How to use neon from your application
This section describes how to add &neon; support to an
application. If you just want to quickly try out &neon;, use
the script.
The &neon; source code is designed to be easily embedded
into an application source tree. &neon; has no dependencies on
libraries other than an SSL toolkit and XML parser, though the
source tree can be configured to have no support for SSL or XML
if desired. To configure the &neon; source code some GNU autoconf
macros are supplied, which can be used in a number of ways, as
follows:
autoconf macros are distributed in the 'macros'
subdirectory of the neon distribution. Use the NEON_LIBRARY
macro from your configure.in to check for the presence of
the neon library installed on the system. The macro adds an
'--with-neon=...' argument to configure, which allows the
user to specify a location for the library (the standard
/usr and /usr/local directories are checked automatically
without having to be specified).
The 'src' directory of the neon package can be
imported directly into your application, if you do not wish
to add an external dependency. If you wish to bundle, use
the NEON_BUNDLED macro to configure neon in your application:
here, the neon sources are bundled in a directory called
'libneon':
NEON_BUNDLED(libneon, ...)
If your application supports builds where srcdir != builddir,
you should use the NEON_VPATH_BUNDLED macro like this:
NEON_VPATH_BUNDLED(${srcdir}/libneon, libneon, ...)
If you use this macro, a '--with-included-neon' option
will be added to the generated configure script. This
allows the user to force the bundled neon to be used in the
application, rather than any neon library found on the
system. If you allow neon to be configured this way, you
must also configure an XML parser. Use the NEON_XML_PARSER
macro to do this.
The final argument to the _BUNDLED macros is a
set of actions which are executed if the bundled build *is*
chosen (rather than an external neon which might have been
found on the user's system). In here, use either the
NEON_LIBTOOL_BUILD or NEON_NORMAL_BUILD macro to set up the
neon Makefile appropriately: including adding the neon source
directory to the recursive make.
A full fragment might be:
NEON_BUNDLED(libneon, [
NEON_NORMAL_BUILD
NEON_XML_PARSER
SUBDIRS="libneon $SUBDIRS"
])
This means the bundled neon source directory (called 'libneon')
is used if no neon is found on the system, and the standard XML
parser search is used.
Standards compliance
&neon; is intended to be compliant with the IETF and W3C
standards which it implements, with a few exceptions due to
practical necessity or interoperability issues. These
exceptions are documented in this section.
RFC 2518, HTTP Extensions for Distributed Authoring—WebDAV
&neon; is deliberately not compliant with section
23.4.2, and treats property names as a (namespace-URI, name)
pair. This is generally
considered to be correct behaviour by the WebDAV
working group, and is likely to formally adopted in a future
revision of the specification.
RFC 2616, Hypertext Transfer Protocol—HTTP/1.1
There is some confusion in this specification about the
use of the identity
transfer-coding. &neon; ignores the
Transfer-Encoding response header if it
contains only the (now deprecated) identity
token, and will determine the response message length as if
the header was not present. &neon; will give an error if a
response includes a Transfer-Encoding
header with a value other than identity
or
chunked
.
RFC 2617, HTTP Authentication: Basic and Digest Access Authentication
&neon; is not strictly compliant with the quoting rules
given in the grammar for the Authorization
header. The grammar requires that the qop
and algorithm parameters are not quoted,
however one widely deployed server implementation
(Microsoft® IIS 5) rejects the request if these parameters
are not quoted. &neon; sends these parameters with
quotes—this is not known to cause any problems with
other server implementations.
Namespaces in XML
The &neon; XML parser interface will accept and parse
without error some XML documents which are well-formed
according to the XML specification but do not conform to the
"Namespaces in XML" specification . Specifically: the restrictions on
the first character of the NCName rule are
not all implemented; &neon; will allow any
CombiningChar, Extender
and some characters from the Digit class in
this position.