Strategies for unit testing an HTTP server.

[Alice Bevan–McGregor]

Hello!

Two things are missing from the web server I've been developing before 
I can release 1.0: unit tests and documentation.  Documentation being 
entirely my problem, I've run into a bit of a snag with unit testing; 
just how would you go about it?

Specifically, I need to test things like HTTP/1.0 request/response 
cycles, HTTP/1.0 keep-alives, HTTP/1.1 pipelined reuqest/response 
cycles, HTTP/1.1 connection: close, HTTP/1.1 chunked 
requests/responses, etc.

What is the recommended / best way to test a daemon in Python?  (Note 
that some of the tests need to keep the "client" socket open.)  Is 
there an easy way to run a daemon in another thread, then kill it after 
running some tests across it?

Even better, are there any dedicated (Python or non-Python) HTTP/1.1 
compliance testing suites?

Thank you for any assistance,

	— Alice.