Question

The HTTP 1.1 RFC restricts a Client from using more than Two TCP connections between any Client and Server. I want to know which Web Application Frameworks enforce this restriction.

Regards

Answer 1

The HTTP 1.1 implementation is not a function of the web application framework, it’s a function of the client or server HTTP agent. In other words, it’s implemented by Safari, Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer on the client side, and Apache or IIS on the server side [*]. Of course, there are a lot more HTTP agents out there that also implement HTTP 1.1; I am just listing the most popular (as in “that I use” :-)) ones.

As far as I know, most of the web application frameworks listed on that Wikipedia article you linked to should happily run on top of Apache and/or IIS at least, so they should be able to benefit from HTTP 1.1. However, if the browser the user is using does not support HTTP 1.1, the default configuration for Apache and IIS will be to fallback to HTTP 1.0, and that will happen transparently to the web app framework of your choice in the most common case.

Update: Your question should be paraphrased (as per your comment) to “Which web application frameworks support only HTTP 1.1 as transport protocol”.

There are no major web service frameworks that enforce endpoint configurations or client calls over HTTP 1.1 only. All of them allow the application code (service or client) to choose the transport. There are two main reasons for this:

1. the protocol choice depends on the deployment configuration of the actual service, so it’s orthogonal to the framework used and is rarely made by the web service developer
2. limiting the transport protocol choice to HTTP 1.1 by the framework means increased adoption barrier, which no framework author would want.

The only frameworks that might enforce particular HTTP version would be ones that come with either their own implementation of the web server or with pre-configured deployment of a major web server (usually Apache). However, I am not aware of any that would enforce HTTP 1.1 only; if anything, they would enforce HTTP 1.0 only.

There is also one very practical reason that prevents HTTP 1.1 enforcementfor web services in general – most deployments are expected to work across an unknown number of middle gateways (firewalls, caching servers, load balancers and so on) which might or might not support HTTP 1.1, so the protocol negotiation between the web service client and the web service endpoint fail without fallback support for HTTP 1.0.

[*] Well, technically, it’s implemented by WinHTTP and WinInet on Windows platform and is just reused by the applications. And I am sure there’s a common library that is reused on Linux as well (probably called libhttp.so or something like it, but don’t quote me on that :-)).