XML Parsing Stategy
Elements of Design
Method Prototype Extension Scheme
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HTTP Client Implementation

As discussed in Section 2.1.2, only a partial implementation of the HTTP protocol is needed in the client proxy. The core Java class java.net.HttpURLConnection provides an implementation of HTTP. The corresponding API is however meant to be used at the URL level--abstracting the HTTP request/response mechanism.
The HTTP header of a SOAP request message (see Section 1.3.3) must contain the SOAPAction field. The Java API does however not support the addition of new (e.g. non-HTTP) fields to the HTTP header.
For these two reasons, those parts of the protocol required by the XMLbroker client module have been implemented--from TCP sockets--in the HttpClient class.