Though this might be better served on the Themis web site, I’m posting this here since it’s not quite official yet.
Over the last few months, Mark and I have been trying to get back into the swing of working on this now ancient project. While Mark is doing some of the more important development, working on a rendering engine, I’ve been just trying to get back into the swing of C/C++ development on BeOS/Haiku. To that end, I’ve been rewriting some of the cookie parsing code, and I’ve implemented a new preferences manager that will allow developers to quickly and easily create, edit, and save preferences from any part of Themis provided they include the appropriate header. This came about because we felt the current preference system was getting to be too big and clunky, though it served its purposes for all these years.
At the moment, I’ve implemented the simplest possible preference manager I could: it flattens and unflattens BMessages to and from (respectively) files in the user’s Themis settings directory, will allow the developer to delete the settings file or even rename it. Ultimately, I think it will be a good idea to make it output and read and parse user editable text files like in the .ini style, but for now this is adequate.
The reason I’m rewriting a part of the cookie parser is that I noticed when going to CNN’s web site in Themis, they tended to set an odd cookie that seemed to cause a crash periodically. Rather than try to insist that CNN fix the problem to comply with Internet standards, I decided it would probably be prudent to make the cookie parsing more robust. Oh, by the way, it seems that Themis is the only browser that I have access to that actually supports the little known and less used Set-Cookie2 header which allows multiple cookies to be set in one header line. Though honestly, I’m not even 100% sure if that header was ever accepted as a standard.