The major features of the neon library are as follows:
A high-level interface to common HTTP and WebDAV methods. This allows you to easily dispatch a GET or a MKCOL request against a resource with a single function call.
A low-level interface for HTTP request handling; allowing you to implement requests using arbitrary methods and request headers, capture arbitrary response headers, and so on.
Persistent connection support; neon groups a set of requests to a server into a "session"; requests within that session can use a persistent (also known as "keep-alive") connection.
Modern HTTP authentication support: a complete implementation of the new authentication standard, RFC2617, supporting the Digest, Basic, and Negotiate protocols. Credentials are supplied by an application-defined callback as appropriate.
Proxy server support; a session can be set to use a proxy server. Authentication is supported for the Proxy as well as the origin server. The system's proxy configuration can be optionally used, on some platforms.
Complete SSL support; a simple interface for enabling SSL, hiding the complexity of using an SSL library directly. Client certificate support, callback-based server certificate verification, along with functions to load trusted CA certificates. Smartcard-based client certs are also supported via a wrapper interface for PKCS#11 modules.
Compressed response support: responses compressed using the "deflate" algorithm can be transparently decompressed.
Generic XML parsing interface for handling XML response bodies using SAX-like callbacks. Both the expat and libxml XML parser libraries are supported.
WebDAV metadata support; set and remove properties, query properties (PROPFIND); simple interface for retrieving "flat" byte-string properties, more advanced support for parsing "complex" structured XML properties.
Build environment support: the neon source tree is designed so that it can be embedded in your application's build tree; autoconf macros are supplied for integration. To get started quickly a neon-config script is included, to easily determine how to compile and link against an installed copy of neon
Complete test suite: the neon test suite comprises half as many lines of source code as the library itself, including many tests for protocol compliance in network behaviour, and that the library implementation meets the guarantees made by the API.