Older blog entries for bagder (starting at number 910)

Talked HTTP/2 at ApacheCon

I was invited as one of the speakers at the ApacheCon core conference in Budapest, Hungary on October 1-2, 2015.

I was once again spreading the news about HTTP/2, why it was made and how it works and of course: updated numbers on adoption right now.

The talk was unfortunately not filmed, but I’ve put my slides for this version of my talk online. Readers of this blog and those who’ve seen my presentations before will recognize large parts of it.

Following my talk was talks about mod_http2, the Apache module for HTTP/2 that will be coming in the upcoming 2.4.17 release of Apache Httpd, explained by its author Stefan Eissing. The name of the module was actually a bit of a surprise to me since it has been known as just mod_h2 for its entire life time up until now.

William A Rowe took us through the state of TLS for the main Apache servers and yeah, the state seem to be pretty good and they’re coming along really well. TLS and then HTTPS is important as that’s really a prerequisite for HTTP/2

I also got to listen to Mark Thomas explain the agonies of making Tomcat support HTTP/2, and then perhaps especially how ALPN and a good set of ciphers are hard to get in Java.

Jean-Frederic Clere then explained how to activate HTTP/2 on all the Apache servers (tomcat, httpd and traffic server) and a little about their HTTP/2 state, following with an explanation how they worked on tomcat to make that use OpenSSL for the TLS layer (including ALPN) to avoid the deadlock of decent TLS support in Java.

All in all, a great track and splendid talks with deep technical content. Exactly the way I like it. Thanks everyone. Apachecon certainly delivered for me! Twas fun.

Syndicated 2015-10-05 11:19:42 from daniel.haxx.se

libbrotli is brotli in lib form

Brotli is this new cool compression algorithm that Firefox now has support for in Content-Encoding, Chrome will too soon and Eric Lawrence wrote up this nice summary about.

So I’d love to see brotli supported as a Content-Encoding in curl too, and then we just basically have to write some conditional code to detect the brotli library, add the adaption code for it and we should be in a good position. But…

There is (was) no brotli library!

It turns out the brotli team just writes their code to be linked with their tools, without making any library nor making it easy to install and use for third party applications.

We can’t have it like that! I rolled up my imaginary sleeves (imaginary since my swag tshirt doesn’t really have sleeves) and I now offer libbrotli to the world. It is just a bunch of files and a build system that sucks in the brotli upstream repo as a submodule and then it builds a decoder library (brotlidec) and an encoder library (brotlienc) out of them. So there’s no code of our own here. Just building on top of the great stuff done by others.

It’s not complicated. It’s nothing fancy. But you can configure, make and make install two libraries and I can now go on and write a curl adaption for this library so that we can get brotli support for it done. Ideally, this (making a library) is something the brotli project will do on their own at some point, but until they do I don’t mind handling this.

As always, dive in and try it out, file any issues you find and send us your pull-requests for everything you can help us out with!

Syndicated 2015-09-30 06:20:09 from daniel.haxx.se

daniel weekly 42, switching off Nagle