[Web-SIG] announcing 'httpmessage'

[Matt Anderson]

Hello all --

A few months ago I found myself wanting to write an HTTP proxy.  I  
surveyed the standard library and pypi for a good foundation on which  
to build such a thing, and I didn't find (or failed to recognize)  
anything particularly well suited to being that foundation.   
Admittedly, I didn't really look *that* hard, as I wanted to better  
learn low level network / web programming anyway.

After a couple of false starts, I've ended up with a package I called  
'httpmessage'.  I've made it available at:

   http://code.google.com/p/httpmessage/

It's my first open source software release. I imagine it might be  
useful to other people, so I spent some extra time putting a little  
polish on the documentation.

It's essentially a low level http library, modeling an HTTP message as  
a dict-like/file-like object hybrid.  Dict-api for raw-header access,  
file-like-api for raw entity access, and a plethora of descriptors for  
higher-level header access.  It knows how to read HTTP messages from a  
file-like object or socket data source.  It tries not to make an  
assumption that you are programming a web client or a web server, just  
that you want to communicate via HTTP.

It isn't extensively tested, isn't that mature, isn't covered by unit  
tests (I'm starting to work on that now) and a few things are even  
still missing.  Yes, a glowing endorsement ;-).  But it's developed to  
the point where I find it to be useful.  Others might too.

Comments, feedback, suggestions welcome.

--
Matt Anderson