[Discussion] HTTP library

Presently, we use httplib2 by default but allow users to specify their own http library (#908) so long as it conforms to httplib2.Http’s signature.

httplib2 was chosen because it’s the underlying http client used by google/oauth2client. However, httplib2 has a variety of issues include not being thread-safe (#1274), not doing any connection pooling, etc.

We should consider what it would take to move to another http library. The major considerations are:

1. We must support using oauth2client’s credentials with the library. The essential functionality is adding the auth header and performing refresh & retry. This can be done either here or within oauth2client.
2. The library must work on Google App Engine.

[theacodes]

Update:

This library now uses google-auth instead of oauth2client. google-auth supports httplib2, requests, and urllib3.

We still need a plan of attack for removing httplib2 as the transport here, but we no longer have a hard dependency on it.

[asilversempirical]

What’s the current status of thread-safety in the python APIs? https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/google-cloud-python/issues/1214 was closed and redirected to this issue, but it’d be nice to have a clearer explanation of what’s going on in this issue with respect to thread safety. FWIW https://developers.google.com/api-client-library/python/guide/thread_safety still mentions only httplib2 and a somewhat cumbersome workaround to ensure thread safety.