Suggestion to app developers: use HTTPS instead of HTTP

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Jon Skeet

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Mar 16, 2019, 4:39:55 PM3/16/19

to Noda Time

Hi folks,

nodatime.org has been running using HTTPS for quite a long time now, first on Azure and now on GKE.

Back on Azure, and as of today on GKE, all HTTP requests are redirected to HTTPS. That means if you have an app that's polling http://nodatime.org/tzdb/latest.txt for changes, each time you make a request it's going to redirect to https://nodatime.org/tzdb/latest.txt.

I'm considering avoiding this - possibly for everything under /tzdb, possibly just for latest.txt. But I'd argue that starting off by sending your requests via HTTPS in the first place would be a good plan. I'll make sure that HTTPS keeps working on nodatime.org - and if you're concerned that I might mess that up (which isn't unreasonable!) you could always consider coding a fallback to HTTP.

Do let me know if you have any thoughts on this. It's actually pretty gratifying to see that we're getting about 2.5qps for tzdb/latest.txt (doubled now due to redirection) - it makes me feel it was worth implementing :)