Work on the incubating HTTP Client has been ongoing in the `http-client-branch` of the JDK sandbox [1] ( and previously in the JDK 10 sandbox [2] ). This issue proposes to take a snapshot of that work so as to refresh the version in the JDK mainline. As of now the mainline that corresponds to JDK 10.

While incubating in JDK 9, the implementation has been almost completely rewritten over in the sandbox. The implementation is now complete asynchronous ( previously HTTP/1.1 has a blocking implementation ). Use of the RX Flow concept been pushed down into the implementation. This eliminates much of the original custom concepts to support HTTP/2. The "flow" of data can now be more easily traced from the user-level request publishers and response subscribers, all the way down to the underlying socket. This significantly reduces the number of concepts and complexity in the code, and maximizes the possibility of reuse between HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2.

[1] hg clone http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk/sandbox; cd sandbox; hg update http-client-branch
[2] http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk10/sandbox/