w_transport 2.0.1

A fluent-style, platform-agnostic library with ready to use transport classes for sending and receiving data over HTTP.

Changelog

2.0.0

The 2.0.0 release is a major breaking release. While many of the patterns from 1.0.x were maintained, the HTTP API was broken up into several request classes and two response classes for a much more robust and useful API. As such, there is no backwards compatibility, but a migration guide is included below.

Features

• WebSockets

  • Single API for the browser and the Dart VM.
  • Option to use SockJS library in place of native WebSockets for the ability to fall back to XHR streaming (configuration only, no API usage difference).

• HTTP

  • Support for most commonly used request types:
    • Request (content-type: text/plain)
    • JsonRequest (content-type: application/json)
    • FormRequest (content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded)
    • MultipartRequest (content-type: multipart/form-data)
  • Synchronous access to response bodies as bytes, text, and JSON.
  • Asynchronous request bodies (StreamedRequest).
  • Asynchronous response bodies via streamGet(), streamPost(), etc. on any of the above request classes.
  • Automatic request encoding and response decoding.

• Mocks

  • Because this library is designed to be platform-agnostic, it's easy to introduce mocks simply by treating tests as another platform, just like the browser or the Dart VM.
  • Import package:w_transport/w_transport_mock.dart and call configureWTransportForTest() to configure w_transport to use mock implementations for every class.
  • No changes necessary to your source code!
  • Utilize the MockTransports class to control WebSocket connections and HTTP requests.

• Testing

  • A big initiative in this 2.0.0 release was to increase our test coverage - which we've done. With almost 1000 statements, w_transport has 99.7% coverage!
  • Since this library is concerned with transport protocols, it is imperative that our testing included rigorous integration tests. We have over 1000 integration tests that run in the browser and on the Dart VM against real servers.
  • Our test suites run against our mock implementations as well to ensure they are in parity with the real implementations.

Migration Guide

WRequest

The WRequest class attempted to cover all HTTP request use cases. Its closest analog now is Request - the class for sending plain-text requests. All other request classes share a similar base API with additional support for a specific type of request data (JSON, form, multipart, or streamed).

WResponse

The WResponse class made request meta data (status, headers) available as soon as the request had finished; however, in an attempt to unify the API between the dart:io HTTP requests and dart:html XHR requests, the response body was only available asynchronously (as a stream, an untyped future, or decoded to text). This meant two asynchronous steps were required for every request - one to get the response, and one to get the response body.

This has been greatly improved by switching to two different response classes:

• Response - response meta data and body available synchronously
• StreamedResponse - response meta data available synchronously, body available as a stream of bytes

1.0.1

Bug Fixes:

• Allow request data to be set to null.
• Canceling an in-flight request now properly results in the returned Future completing with an error.
• Request data type validation now happens when sending the request instead of upon assignment, allowing intermediate data assignments.
• Verify w_transport configuration has been set before constructing a WHttp instance.

1.0.0

• Initial version of w_transport: a fluent-style, platform-agnostic library with ready to use transport classes for sending and receiving data over HTTP.