W3C libwww
Libwww - the W3C Protocol Library
News | Why libwww? | Get it! | Installation | Latest updates | Release Notes | Documentation | Mailing list | Legal | Authors & Hackers
Libwww is a highly modular, general-purpose client side Web API written in C for
Unix and Windows (Win32). It's well suited for both small and large
applications, like
browser/editors,
robots,
batch tools, etc. Pluggable
modules provided with libwww include complete
HTTP/1.1 (with caching, pipelining, PUT, POST, Digest Authentication, deflate, etc),
MySQL logging,
FTP,
HTML/4,
XML (expat),
RDF (SiRPAC), WebDAV, and much more. The purpose of libwww is to serve as a testbed for protocol experiments.
- January 29, 2004: Results of the future of Libwww survey. W3C is pasing over development of libwww to the Open Source community. Check the announcement for more info.
- September 2, 2003: Future of Libwww Survey. W3C has stopped work on libwww and invites the libwww user community to participate in a Future of Libwww Survey that will help to determine its future. A public W3C account is required to complete the survey. This survey will close on September 30. Read about W3C Open Source Software.
Nearby: Sample Applications | CVS Repository | ToDo | Modules and Packages
- June 12 2002: Re-packaging of the libwww 5.4.0 release. The packages were missing the Win32 makefile files. If you had already downloaded the previous package and are missing these files, the missing files are also available in the libwww-win32.zip package. The Installation guide gives more information on how to get you set up.
- June 10 2002: Release of the libwww 5.4.0 WIN32 precompiled binary package. This is a companion package to the latest libwww distribution and includes precompiled versions of the libwww DLL files, as well as most of the libwww applications, including the Web Commander..
- June 7 2002: Release of libwww 5.4.0. This release includes WebDAV support, enhancements in the RDF parser and some bug fixes. Check the release notes for more information.
- May 30 2002:Update of the libwww WIN32 makefiles to include the DAV package. The zip package now also includes the
.def files, as the config/winConfigure.pl script seems to have problems to generate them on some platforms. - May 30 2002: Manuele Kirschpi added WebDAV support to libwww. (well, this actually happened a couple of months ago, but I had forgotten to update this page).U
- December 20 2000: Release of libwww 5.3.2. This release includes enhancements in the RDF parser and many bug fixes, principally in the cache, the chunk, and the hash modules. Check the release notes for more information.
- September 22 2000: libwwww survey. We're conducting a survey to try to find out who uses libwww and where should we take libwww next.
The survey has concluded, but I haven't had time to compile the results. Help is welcome. - Release of libwww 5.3.1. This release includes patches that mostly fix problems with the SSL interface and the Windows asynchronous event handler. The release notes give a more detailed change list. N.B., we decided to skip the 5.3.0 release number, as some people were already refering to the pre-release as the final release.
- August 4 2000: Release of libwww 5.3.1. This release includes patches that mostly fix problems with the SSL interface and the Windows asynchronous event handler. The release notes give a more detailed change list. N.B., we decided to skip the 5.3.0 release number, as some people were already refering to the pre-release as the final release.
- June 9 2000: Pre-release of libwww 5.3.0. It's been over a year since the last release. Libwww has continued to evolve and patches have been contributed. This release is a snapshot of the current state of the CVS base. In addition, thanks to a change in the US legislation, it now contains the source code for the SSL interface. As this is the first release since Henrik left, we have a testing period, to see if everything works OK, and to have time to finish upgrading the release notes. The change in the version reflects this as the first libwww user's community release of their own library (even if that sounds corny!) This code is available as usual from CVS.
- Aug 29 1999:Using libwww with gtk James Henstridge: wrote up some event register/unregister functions that use the glib event loop. This makes libwww fit nicely into just about any gnome or gtk+ program. This code may be useful for other people wanting to use libwww with gtk.
- Jul 7 1999: libwww-SSL library is available for testing in the US! Thanks to Jeff Schiller who have made his export controlled server available, we can distribute Olga's glue code between openSSL and libwww. It should run on both Unix and Windows - try it out!
- Jun 25: 1999: Slides from libwww presentation - explains some of the why's and how's
- Jun 20, 1999: Number of checkout from CVS exceeds 1700!
- Apr 18, 1999: John Punin: Added RDF parser to the XML module in libwww - help testing!
- Apr 17, 1999: Vladimir Kozlov has generated wintel libwww 5.2.8 binaries - available from his IDM Web site
- Apr 3, 1999: Check out the libwww hall of fame - truly cool hackers!
- Apr 3, 1999: Olga Antropova: SSL transport in libwww - help testing!
- Apr 3, 1999: Raffaele Sena: Added HTML4.0 support in libwww HTML parser
- Mar 31: 1999: Interested in helping porting to Macs? Follow the dicussions!
- Mar 4, 1999: Daniel Veillard has put up a cool new version of cvsweb which provides Web access to the libwww CVS codebase
- Feb 24, 1999: Release of libwww 5.2.6 with lots of new features including:
- Feb 23, 1999: Integration of James Clark's Expat XML parser into libwww. Also check out the new XML sample application demonstrating how the integration works.
- Feb 16, 1999: New set of MSVC makefiles for all of the libwww and its sample applications
- Feb 9, 1999: New tiny, Web browser with only a strict minimum of HTTP and HTML committed to CVS in only 170K on linux (stripped)
- Jan 6, 1999: Improved libwww HTML parser and new callback interface committed to CVS
See also the libwww timeline for past news items and events
Please send all requests regarding libwww to < www-lib@w3.org> public mailing list. This list is archived at W3C and also at findmail. Note, you MUST be subscribed in order to post to the mailing list. Follow these shortcuts to quick subscribe or quick unsubscribe or see the information on mailing lists for more details.
The development of libwww depends on YOU! The more people who are contributing and helping the development, the more useful the code base gets. Check out the list of libwww hackers who provide invaluable contributions to the libwww code base and find out how you can help!
- Henrik Frystyk Nielsen
- Designed and implemented libwww from version 2.17 up to version 5.2.8
- Tim Berners-Lee and Jean-Francois Groff
- Came up with the initial design and implementation of libwww
José Kahan,
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