Making Packager-Friendly Software, Part 2 (O'ReillyNet)

Making Packager-Friendly Software, Part 2 (O'ReillyNet)

So, a call to the C++ function "istream openResource(const string URL);" is a TCP socket? I could open a file, do a HTTP transaction, handle HTTPS, or any one of a number of tricks behind the scenes to make my library do the work for you. Whatever happens, all you care about is that my function doesn't change, not that the underlying implementation (OpenSSL or GnuTLS for SSL, fork and call wget or use the OPP library, whatever) doesn't change.