W3C libwww RELEASE

Library 5.0 Release Notes

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This release was originally called 4.1 but because we now have a complete HTTP/1.1 client side implemenation including a persistent cache manager and full support for uploading documents, we decided to call it version 5.0 instead. The main new features are:

The focus for version 5.0 of the W3C Reference Library is to provide a set of higher level, application specific APIs for accessing the Web. The Library contains a significantly improved 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. The Library now includes a set of profiles that helps the application, a Web client for example, to more easily use the full potential of the application independent Library core.

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

NOTE Check out the latest  list of public functions

Release 5.0a October 10 1996

New Features and APIs

Changes and Updates

Bugfixes

Release 5.0 September 10 1996

The 5.0 release has now a full persistent cache manager which works on Unix, and Windows NT. It has not been tested on other platforms, but it is based on strict ANSI C and has been designed to be portable.

Bug Fixes

Release 4.1b5 August 24 1996

Release 4.1b5 is mainly a bug fix release after intensive testing against the Common Lisp Server which also is a HTTP/1.1 application. However, it also has a few new features worth noting.

New Features

Bug Fixes

Release 4.1b4 August 20 1996

HTTP version 1.1 allows for effective use of persistent connections. However, in orderto make this work, a client application must be capable of recovering from a closed connection between sent requests. The beta 4 version of libwww supports automatic connection recovery and provides the functionality for performing pipelining of requests. That is, there can be multiple outstanding requests on the same connection In order to do this, the release contains  modifications to the Channel Object, the Host object and the Net object.

New Features

Bug Fixes

Release 4.1b3 July 20 1996

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 1.1.1.1 1996/10/15 13:08:32 cvs Exp $