Copyright (c) 1994 Regents of the University of California.
libwww-perl is a library of Perl4 packages which
provides a simple and consistent programming interface to the
World-Wide Web. This library is being developed as a collaborative
effort to assist the further development of useful WWW clients and
tools. The library is based on version 4.036 of the Perl Programming Language.
libwww-perl is freely available as described in
the Artistic License which accompanies the
standard distribution. The libwww-perl software
architecture and standard distribution package are copyrighted by the
University of California for the sole purpose of retaining consistency
and coherence in the distribution of the library. Contributions to the
library are strongly encouraged and will be included in the standard
distribution with full citation to the developers.
See below for the list of past and current contributors.
A mailing list has been
established for technical discussion about libwww-perl,
including problem reports, interim fixes, suggestions for features,
and contributions. The mailing list address is
libwww-perl@ics.uci.edu
and administrivia (including subscribe requests) should be sent to
A contrib
directory has been established for perl source that is not (yet)
part of the libwww-perl package, but which may be useful to current
implementors.
Support for the initial development and distribution of libwww-perl
has been provided by the
Arcadia Project at UCI, part of the larger
Arcadia Consortium for
research in software engineering environments.
Support for GET and HEAD requests on file://localhost URLs
is provided, with results translated to HTTP responses as if they were
handled by an HTTP gateway.
Tools based on libwww-perl
The following tools use libwww-perl and are available at their
own distribution sites:
Extract a list of URL's from either your mosaic hotlist or from a
HTML document, retrieve their Last-modified dates, and output a HTML
file with the URL's sorted by their last modification time.
Contributors
Developing code to handle all the request formats and protocols present
on the World-Wide Web is too big a task for any one person or organization.
For that reason, the future of this library is dependent on the contributions
of those who make use of it. Please send in your extensions so that we can
all benefit from the effort required to make distributed information systems
work.
The following developers have contributed (either directly or indirectly)
to the libwww-perl distribution:
Alberto Accomazzi, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, USA
These people contributed to prior packages which influenced the
development of libwww-perl: Steven E. Brenner (cgi-lib),
Marion Hakanson (ctime),
Waldemar Kebsch (ctime), Tony Sanders (Plexus), and Larry Wall (Perl).
The Distribution
For easy distribution, libwww-perl is available as a
gzip'd tar file or as a
compress'd tar file. It is also available via
anonymous
ftp from liege.ics.uci.edu in the directory
/pub/arcadia/libwww-perl
a simple program for performing WWW GET requests from the
command-line. The name of the program determines what request method
to be used (i.e. create a link to it called "HEAD" and you have a
program that does HEAD requests). This program demonstrates the power
and simplicity of the libwww-perl interface.
the primary entry point for WWW requests -- give it any absolute
URL and a request method and it will try to perform the method using
the URL's protocol scheme (or a proxy).
a package of library utilities for parsing, composing,
manipulating, and canonicalizing Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) as
they are used by the World-Wide Web software and protocols.
If you have any suggestions, bug reports, fixes, or enhancements, send
them to
Roy Fielding at (fielding@ics.uci.edu) or, preferably, join the
libwww-perl mailing list as described above.
Also, we would like to ask anyone who uses libwww-perl on a
regular basis, or intends to include it as part of their own tool, to
please send us an e-mail message which indicates how
and where it is being used. This is, of course, only voluntary and we
don't want anyone to divulge private information, but please
understand that such acknowledgements allow free-software authors like
us to justify the time and effort needed to build quality tools and
development environments.
Please see the file Artistic.txt for complete
licensing and redistribution information.
IN NO EVENT SHALL THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BE LIABLE TO ANY PARTY
FOR DIRECT, INDIRECT, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES
ARISING OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE AND ITS DOCUMENTATION
(INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, LOST PROFITS) EVEN IF THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
This work was sponsored in part by the Advanced Research Projects
Agency under Grant Number MDA972-91-J-1010. This software does not
necessarily reflect the position or policy of the U.S. Government and no
official endorsement should be inferred. Their support is appreciated.
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libwww-perl: Distribution Information