I was quite pleased to see Odi’s post this morning stating that the NTLM code in HttpClient (now HttpComponents) has finally been replaced with a more robust and compatible version that supports the more modern NTLM variants. Many years ago that NTLM code was my first contribution to someone else’s open source project and it lead on to me writing a bunch of documentation and becoming an Apache committer. In turn, that’s put me in touch with a whole heap of incredibly smart people.

Sadly, the HttpClient 2.0 build proved so stable and reliable that I really didn’t have any more itches to scratch around the project and as the APIs changed quite significantly over the next couple of releases we still haven’t upgraded. With the new NTLM code now landing and the huge improvements already made everywhere else, I suspect there’s no longer any trace of my ever contributing to the project.

So a big congratulations to Odi, Oleg and the rest of the team that are still pushing HttpComponents forward and doing a great job of it.