Today I released PECLs HTTP extension version 0.12
A lot of work and fixes have gone into it, and I hope it's becoming stable even this century ;)
Major changes are a general API cleanup where AuthBasic hooks have been removed and many HttpRequest methods have been sanitized.
The HttpResponse class should now work with PHP5 as a webserver module as well and should not any longer have hard dependencies on ext/session and ext/zlib.
Additionally, if you have libmhash (note: not necessarily ext/mhash) you can choose a hashing algorithm provided by libmhash to generate your ETags, which is done through the following INI setting: http.etag_mode = MHASH_SHA256 (MHASH_SHA256 is an example and can be replaced by any MHASH constant if you have ext/mhash).
The message and header parsers have been vastly improved to be able to parse (in principle invalid) messages and headers that only have a single LF instead of CRLF.
And last but not least it should again flawlessly build for PHP4.
So far, have fun and be sure to check it out! :)