W3C libwww

Change History of libwww

This is a list of changes to libwww in reverse chronological order. See also the release notes for the latest release.

Release 5.3.2, Dec 20, 2000

This is a minor release that mainly provides bug fixes and small enhancements that have been commited to CVS since the last release. Vladimir Koslov provided indispensable help for testing and preparing the Win32 release. Special thanks to Wayne Davison, Art Barstow, Peter Stamfest, Zhu Qun-Ying, Jens Meggers, Ken Olum for their contributions.

Release 5.3.1, Aug 4, 2000

This is the proper first 5.3 release. We changed the minor release number as many people had started to refer to the previous release as 5.3.0.

Release 5.3.0pre, Jun 9, 2000

This is the first release done after Henrik's depart from W3C. We're calling it a pre-release, as we're not sure if we prepared it correctly. Special thanks to Henrik Frystik, Fox One, Vladimir Koslov, Rafaelle Sena, and all the other libwww User's Community for their patches and continuous support.

Release 5.2.8, Apr 14, 1999

For this release, special thanks go to the libwww hackers Olga Antropova, Vladimir Kozlov, John Punin Olga Antropova, Jose Kahan, Vladimir Kozlov, John Punin, Bob Racko, and Raffaele Sena for all their hard work and cool new features including:

Also in progress is work on

Release 5.2.6, Feb 24, 1999

This release is the has a lot of bug fixes and new features - primarily as a result of lots of really cool work done by people hacking away on libwww including:

Release 5.2, Nov 1, 1998

This release is the first release after the libwww CVS Repository was made public in May 1998. At the time of the release there were more than 500 checked out versions of the libwww code base and numerous people have contributed to this release in form of bug fixes, extensions, and new features.

New Features

Bug Fixes

Release 5.1m May 21, 1998

New Features

Bug Fixes

Release 5.1l March 25, 1998

This is a small add-on to 5.1k that was released two days ago. It has a few fixes that was discovered while working with the latest Arena browser.

Bug Fixes

Release 5.1k March 23, 1998

New Features

Bug Fixes

Release 5.1j March 9, 1998

New Features

Bug Fixes

Release 5.1f January 1998

New Features

Bug Fixes

Release 5.1e January 1998

New Features

Bug Fixes

Release 5.1d December 1997

Bug Fixes

New Features

Release 5.1c September 1997

Release 5.1b April 1997

Bug Fixes

Release 5.1 February 18 1997

New Features and APIs

Bug Fixes

Release 5.0 September 10 1996

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 focus for version 5.0 of the W3C Sample Code 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.

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.

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

Release 4.0D February 12 1996

This upgrade release fixes some bugs and it adds functionality for posting data from memory. This is the full list of changes:

Release 4.0C January 23 1996

Release 4.0A December 11 1995

Release 4.0 December 1 1995

Alpha Release 7, November 28 1995

Alpha Release 6, November 20 1995

Release 4.0C January 23 1996

Release 4.0A December 11 1995

Release 4.0 December 1 1995

Alpha Release 7, November 28 1995

Alpha Release 6, November 20 1995

Release 4.0C January 23 1996

Release 4.0A December 11 1995

Release 4.0 December 1 1995

Alpha Release 7, November 28 1995

Alpha Release 6, November 20 1995

Release 4.0C January 23 1996

Release 4.0A December 11 1995

Release 4.0 December 1 1995

Alpha Release 7, November 28 1995

Alpha Release 6, November 20 1995

Release 4.0C January 23 1996

Release 4.0A December 11 1995

Release 4.0 December 1 1995

Alpha Release 7, November 28 1995

Alpha Release 6, November 20 1995

Release 4.0C January 23 1996

Release 4.0A December 11 1995

Release 4.0 December 1 1995

Alpha Release 7, November 28 1995

Alpha Release 6, November 20 1995

Release 4.0C January 23 1996

Release 4.0A December 11 1995

Release 4.0 December 1 1995

Alpha Release 7, November 28 1995

Alpha Release 6, November 20 1995

Release 4.0C January 23 1996

Release 4.0A December 11 1995

Release 4.0 December 1 1995

Alpha Release 7, November 28 1995

Alpha Release 6, November 20 1995

Release 4.0C January 23 1996

Release 4.0A December 11 1995

Release 4.0 December 1 1995

Alpha Release 7, November 28 1995

Alpha Release 6, November 20 1995