Major Description
In the exception handling in the doStart() method of the HttpClientTransport vital debugging information is lost.
On line 282, for any encountered exception an IOException is thrown with the following message: '"Failed to perform GET on: " + remoteUrl + " as response was: " + e.getMessage()'. Where e.getMessage() usually returns null.
It would be nicer if at least he http status code was logged, and maybe the stacktrace when trace is enabled.