XMLHttpRequest Emulation for node.js
This is an npm package that implements the W3C XMLHttpRequest specification on top of the node.js APIs.
Supported Platforms
This library is tested against the following platforms.
Keep in mind that the versions above are not hard requirements.
Installation and Usage
The preferred installation method is to add the library to the dependencies
section in your package.json
.
{
"dependencies": {
"xhr2": "*"
}
}
Alternatively, npm
can be used to install the library directly.
npm install xhr2
Once the library is installed, require
-ing it returns the XMLHttpRequest
constructor.
var XMLHttpRequest = require('xhr2');
The other objects that are usually defined in an XHR environment are hanging off of XMLHttpRequest
.
var XMLHttpRequestUpload = XMLHttpRequest.XMLHttpRequestUpload;
MDN (the Mozilla Developer Network) has a great intro to XMLHttpRequest.
This library's CoffeeDocs can be used as quick reference to the XMLHttpRequest specification parts that were implemented.
Features
The following standard features are implemented.
http
andhttps
URI protocols- Basic authentication according to the XMLHttpRequest specification
- request and response header management
send()
accepts the following data types: String, ArrayBufferView, ArrayBuffer (deprecated in the standard)responseType
values:text
,json
,arraybuffer
readystatechange
and download progress eventsoverrideMimeType()
abort()
timeout
- automated redirection following
The following node.js extensions are implemented.
send()
accepts a node.js Buffer- Setting
responseType
tobuffer
produces a node.js Buffer nodejsSet
does XHR network configuration that is not exposed in browsers, for security reasons
The following standard features are not implemented.
- FormData
- Blob
file://
URIsdata:
URIs- upload progress events
- synchronous operation
- Same-origin policy checks and CORS
- cookie processing
Versioning
The library aims to implement the W3C XMLHttpRequest specification, so the library's API will always be a (hopefully growing) subset of the API in the specification.
Development
The following commands will get the source tree in a node-xhr2/
directory and build the library.
git clone git://github.com/pwnall/node-xhr2.git
cd node-xhr2
npm install
npm pack
Installing CoffeeScript globally will let you type cake
instead of node_modules/.bin/cake
npm install -g coffeescript
The library comes with unit tests that exercise the XMLHttpRequest API.
cake test
The tests themselves can be tested by running them in a browser environment, where a different XMLHttpRequest implementation is available. Both Google Chrome and Firefox deviate from the specification in small ways, so it's best to run the tests in both browsers and mentally compute an intersection of the failing tests.
cake webtest
BROWSER=firefox cake webtest
Copyright and License
The library is Copyright (c) 2013 Victor Costan, and distributed under the MIT License.