Basic Design Model

The main criteria behind the design of libwww was to make it easily extensible as new Internet standards evolve for transportation and representation of data objects. The philosophy was to make it possible to dynamically "plug-in" new modules without touching the inner parts of the Library. On platforms that support dynamic linking this can be used to change the functionality of an application completely at runtime and eventually the Library can be extended to support some of the new concepts of mobile code where new modules can be down loaded from the network at runtime as they are needed in the application. The result of this concept was a Library architecture consisting of 5 main parts as illustrated in the figure below:

The figure is similar to a protocol stack where the lower layers provide a set of services to the upper layers. This is also the case in the Library where the "layering" is as follows:

Generic Utilities

The Library provides a large set of generic utility modules such as container classes, string utilities, network utilities etc. They have the important function to separate the upper layer code from platform specific implementations using a large set of macros that makes the Library more portable. The modules are used throughout the Library itself and can easily be employed in many applications.

Core

This part is the fundamental part of the Library. The size of the core is deliberately kept small and it is important to note that it can do nothing on its own; all the functionality for accessing the network, parsing data objects, handling user interaction, logging etc. is part of the upper modules in the figure. The core provides a standard interface to the application program for requesting a service but most often the handling of the request itself takes place outside the core.

Stream Modules

All data is transported back and forth from the application to the network and vice verse using streams. Streams are objects that accept blocks of characters, pretty much as ANSI C FILE streams accept blocks of characters. A block can be as small as one character but large blocks are normally preferred for better performance. Often, even though not required, a stream has an output to which it directs outgoing data. An example of a stream with no output is a stream that acts like a black hole - it absorbs data without ever sending it out again. However, the typical situation for a stream is to have an output and to perform some kind of data conversion on the incoming data before it is redirected to the output.

Access Modules

The Access modules are protocol specific modules that makes the application capable of communicating with a wide range of Internet services. The Library comes with a wide set of protocol access modules such as HTTP, FTP, Gopher, WAIS, NNTP, Telnet, rlogin, TN3270, and the local file system, but new ones can easily be added to the list.

Application Modules

The application modules are often specific for client applications including functions that require user interaction, management of history lists, call back functions, logging etc. The reference implementation of these modules are often intended for character based applications like the Line Mode Browser. More advanced clients can override them, that is, a module with an identical interface is provided by the application, and the loading of the default module suppressed.

When writing an application most of the code interacting with the Library will consist of access modules, stream modules, and application modules. These modules can either provide additional functionality or override existing functionality in the Library in order to make use of more platform dependent implementations. The latter will typically be the case with the application modules which must be adjusted to a given graphic platform.

The User's Guide explains more on how to set up and use the Access modules and the Stream modules in an application and how to use the application modules. The rest of this document on the architecture of libwww is devoted to describing the Core.