NEON(3) neon API reference NEON(3)NAME
neon - HTTP and WebDAV client library
DESCRIPTION
neon is an HTTP and WebDAV client library. The major abstractions
exposed are the HTTP session, created by ne_session_create(3); and the
HTTP request, created by ne_request_create(3). HTTP authentication is
handled transparently for server and proxy servers, see
ne_set_server_auth(3); complete SSL/TLS support is also included, see
ne_ssl_set_verify(3).
CONVENTIONS
Some conventions are used throughout the neon API, to provide a consis‐
tent and simple interface; these are documented below.
Thread-safeness and global initialization
neon itself is implemented to be thread-safe (avoiding any use of
global state), but relies on the operating system providing a
thread-safe resolver interface. Modern operating systems offer the
thread-safe getaddrinfo interface, which neon supports; some others
implement gethostbyname using thread-local storage.
To allow thread-safe use of the OpenSSL library, the application must
register some locking callbacks in accordance with the OpenSSL documen‐
tation: http://www.openssl.org/docs/crypto/threads.html.
Some platforms and libraries used by neon require global initialization
before use; notably:
· OpenSSL requires global initialization to load shared lookup tables.
· The SOCKS library requires initialization before use.
· The Win32 socket library requires initialization before use.
The ne_sock_init(3) function should be called before any other use of
neon to perform any necessary initialization needed for the particular
platform.
Namespaces
To avoid possible collisions between names used for symbols and pre‐
processor macros by an application and the libraries it uses, it is
good practice for each library to reserve a particular namespace pre‐
fix. An application which ensures it uses no names with these prefixes
is then guaranteed to avoid such collisions.
The neon library reserves the use of the namespace prefixes ne_ and
NE_. The libraries used by neon may also reserve certain namespaces;
collisions between these libraries and a neon-based application will
not be detected at compile time, since the underlying library inter‐
faces are not exposed through the neon header files. Such collisions
can only be detected at link time, when the linker attempts to resolve
symbols. The following list documents some of the namespaces claimed by
libraries used by neon; this list may be incomplete.
SSL, ssl, TLS, tls, ERR_, BIO_, d2i_, i2d_, ASN1_
Some of the many prefixes used by the OpenSSL library; little
attempt has been made to keep exported symbols within any par‐
ticular prefixes for this library.
XML_, Xml[A-Z]
Namespaces used by the expat library.
xml[A-Z], html[A-Z], docb[A-Z]
Namespaces used by the libxml2 library; a relatively small num‐
ber of symbols are used without these prefixes.
Argument validation
neon does not attempt to validate that the parameters passed to func‐
tions conform to the API (for instance, checking that pointer arguments
are not NULL). Any use of the neon API which is not documented to pro‐
duce a certain behaviour results is said to produce undefined behav‐
iour; it is likely that neon will segfault under these conditions.
URI paths, WebDAV metadata
The path strings passed to any function must be URI-encoded by the
application; neon never performs any URI encoding or decoding inter‐
nally. WebDAV property names and values must be valid UTF-8 encoded
Unicode strings.
User interaction
As a pure library interface, neon will never produce output on stdout
or stderr; all user interaction is the responsibilty of the applica‐
tion.
Memory handling
neon does not attempt to cope gracefully with an out-of-memory situa‐
tion; instead, by default, the abort function is called to immediately
terminate the process. An application may register a custom function
which will be called before abort in such a situation; see ne_oom_call‐
back(3).
Callbacks and userdata
Whenever a callback is registered, a userdata pointer is also used to
allow the application to associate a context with the callback. The
userdata is of type void *, allowing any pointer to be used.
SEE ALSOne_session_create(3), ne_oom_callback(3)AUTHOR
Joe Orton <neon@webdav.org>.
neon 0.25.5 20 January 2006 NEON(3)