Implementing the HTTP client application

HTTP clients constitute important class of distributed software and are represented by many applications. Web browsers are prominent representatives of this class. They use HTTP protocols to request web pages from web servers. However, today HTTP protocol is used not only in the web. Many distributed applications use this protocol to exchange custom data of any kind. Often, when designing a distributed application, choosing HTTP as a communication protocol is a much better idea than developing custom one.

In this recipe, we will consider an implementation of HTTP client using Boost.Asio that satisfies the following basic requirements:

• Supports the HTTP GET request method

• Executes requests asynchronously

• Supports request canceling

Let's move on to the implementation.

How to do it…

Because one of the requirements of our client application is to support canceling requests that have been initiated but have not been completed yet, we need to make sure that canceling...