The W3C Sample Code Library supports direct WAIS access which means that all applications built on top of the Library can serve as a WWW-WAIS gateway. Making your application capable of accessing WAIS servers requires that you link libwww with the freeWAIS library. Note that any type of application can have direct WAIS access including servers and clients. This page explains how you can set up your own WWW-WAIS gateway. There are basically two conditions that must be fulfilled in order to do this:
If you do not enable direct WAIS access, your application may still access WAIS servers by passing through another WWW-WAIS gateway. As an example, W3C provides such a gateway as a special service. You can find the gateway at http://www.w3.org:8001. Please note the special port 8001 which must be a part of the URL.
You can enable direct WAIS in libwww as an optional feature in the GNU configure script Please read the installation instructions for more details
The gateway keeps a cache of WAIS "source" files. These are files describing WAIS servers, and are parsed, and are kept in the directory /usr/local/lib/WAIS under the server name, port, and database name.
They are normally picked up automatically by searching a directory of servers index. Once the gateway has picked up a description of a server, it uses the description to describe the server to those who follow links to it. (See the HTWSRC module in libwww)