Recommendation for a C/C++ HTTP client library for Windows Mobile 6 ?

Question

I'm trying to port a win32 application to Windows Mobile 6 / 6.1 / 6.5. It uses winhttp which doesn't appear to be available on the mobile platforms.

My initial thought was to replace it with WinInet - but I wondered if anyone had a better idea?

Answer 1

WinInet is actually a more appropriate HTTP client library for client nodes.

Here's some things I like about WinInet voer WinHttp:

1. If your client app needs to make lots of requests from the same server, WinInet will implicitly queue the requests up so as not to flood the server. (But is transparent to the client app). In other words, it respects RFC 2616 guidelines on simultaneous connections. This is great when your app is pulling down a lot of images (or files) from the same server simultanously.

2. Will the use the IE cache for fetching content. (Which I assume an equivalent cache exists on Mobile platforms).

3. Proxy server auto-detected from IE settings. Probably less of an issue with mobile since the IP network is a bit more open. But if you had to support proxy servers with WinHttp, you'd have to use other API calls to specify the server directly.

Answer 2

I've used Wininet and it works. But it's not ideal as its timeouts are broken. And developing a complete asynchronous design with it required a ton of code.

So instead, I'm trying libcurl.

So far though, I still haven't managed to get it compile properly and link. Porting stuff is such a pain sometimes. But I digress. ;)