- From: Joel Young <jdy@cs.brown.edu>
- Date: Tue, 06 Nov 2001 14:23:22 -0500
- To: "Fred Covely" <fcovely@bcftech.com>
- cc: www-lib@w3.org
> I am curious as to the 'strategic' direction of libwww. There was a post a while ago from one of the former maintainers that libwww is in "user maintenance". > Nevertheless it seems to me that a major rewrite is in order. Yes. > It might make a lot of sense to do such a rewrite in C++ using STL and > integrating with other open source efforts (Xerces comes to mind). It might make a good addition to and make good use of the libraries at www.boost.org. > It may make sense to keep a lot of the libwww semantics, while moving > everything to C++. Yup, however it should no longer be an application framework. In the "old days" many applications that used the web was at its heart a web application so the framework worked. Now the web is an auxiliary to many programs. Component libraries are a better and more reusable choice. Libwww could be split into a network library, a mime library, a stream library, a parsing library, etc... Where these components are already robust with the appropriate licenses the libwww versions should be scrapped. A new libwww should use standard types as much as possible to facilitate interaction (and minimize copying) with other libraries. There should be absolutely zero global state requiring library user awareness. Joel
Received on Tuesday, 6 November 2001 14:23:26 UTC