W3C libwww RELEASE

Library 4.1 Release Notes

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The focus for version 4.1 of the W3C Reference Library is to provide a set of higher level, application specific APIs for accessing the Web. These APIs - called profiles - will help the application, a Web client for example, to more easily use the full potential of the application independent Library core. Also, the Library contains a significantly better interface for easy access to the Web through a large set of functions specialized to perform certain Web operations like PUT, POST, DELETE, GET and HEAD.

NOTE Check out the latest  list of public functions

Release 4.1b3 July 20 1996

This release contains a TCL add-on to the Robot example application and a Deja GNU Test suite for the Library. Also, it support HTTP/1.1 including persistent connections, two-way PUT, and the host header. There is also a sample PEP implementation, that although incomplete can give an idea of where we're headed using PEP.

The file access module now does content negotiation by default. This means that all local file access (including from client applications) do content negotiation when accessing local files. Content negotiation can be turned off by setting a flag in the request object.

A main difference in beta 3 is that we now have a set of "application profiles" that helps the application to initialize libwww core to work as a typical client, robot or other type of application. This should replace the huge initialization procedure seen in previous versions. This is in fact a result of the core being so flexible - it is inly a framework for accessing the Web. The application must initialize all the functionality at run-time. You can see the various profile functions in the WWWInit interface.

The second main difference is that the BEFORE and AFTER filters have been more explicit than before. The HTLoadStart and HTLoadTerminate functions actually covered many typical BEFORE and AFTER filter functions like looking for proxies, searching the cache, looking for rule file matching, and logging etc.

However, two functions were not covered by this: redirection and authentication. That is why the application in previous version had to supply this functionality. However, in beta 3 we have split up the HTLoadStart and HTLoadTerminte functions into a set of filters which each perform only a single function, for example looking for proxies. The split has two functions: first it shows how you can use filtes to add new functionality to the Library and second it can be used by more types of applications. A result of the new filters is that we also have default redirection and authentication filters so you don't have to provide this anymore.

The filters are set up as part of the profiles so you will normally not have to register them individually.

New features and Changes

Bug Fixes

Release 4.1b1 May 20 1996

New Features


Henrik Frystyk Nielsen, libwww@w3.org,

@(#) $Id: ReleaseNotes.html,v 1.35 1996/07/20 18:14:50 frystyk Exp $