[Announcement] Future of Libwww Survey

Folks,

W3C has stopped work on Libwww [1] and invites the libwww user community to
participate in a Future of Libwww Survey [2] that will help to determine 
its future. Libwww is a free, highly modular client side Web API written 
in C for Unix and Windows. A public W3C account is required to
complete the survey [3].

Read more about W3C Open Source/Free software [4].

The full text of the announcement is included here below.

[1] http://www.w3.org/Library/
[2] http://www.w3.org/Library/Survey2
[3] http://cgi.w3.org/MemberAccess/Public
[4] http://www.w3.org/Status

-jose

----------------- FULL ANNOUNCEMENT ----------

Future of Libwww Survey

    --------------------------------------------------------------

    Due to lack of resources, the World Wide Web Consortium is unable to
    continue the development and support of libwww[3]. The purpose of this
    message is to get more information from the existing libwww user
    community to know what steps should be taken next.

    Libwww is a highly modular, general-purpose client side Web API written
    in C for Unix and Windows (Win32). It's well suited for both small and
    large applications, like browser/editors, robots, batch tools, etc.
    Pluggable modules provided with libwww include a complete HTTP/1.1
    implementation (with caching, pipelining, PUT, POST, Digest
    Authentication, deflate, etc), MySQL logging, FTP, HTML/4, XML (expat),
    RDF (SiRPAC), WebDAV, and much more. The purpose of libwww is to serve as
    a testbed for protocol experiments.

    Development of libwww goes back to 1991. Inside W3C, it had a major role
    within the HTTP Working Group. More recently, it is being used by the
    Amaya editor and browser. There are other HTTP libraries developed by
    other people. However, libwww is the only library that has a full
    implementation of the HTTP specification, including caching and
    pipelining.

    In order to evaluate whether there are enough people willing to continue
    working on libwww or if the project should be stopped, we would
    appreciate your taking some time to answer a survey on "The Future of
    libwww". We're conducting this survey in order to get a better idea of
    what are libwww's limitations, where new developments/effort should be
    invested, and how many people are actively using it.

    We have prepared a public on-line WBS[4] survey at
    http://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/1/libwww/[5]. Having an on-line survey
    allows us to compile the results on-the-fly. If you have never answered a
    W3C public WBS questionnaire before, you will first need to request a W3C
    Public Account[6]. Sorry for this inconvenience.

    The survey is open from September 2 up to September 30, 2003. Individual
    answers will be kept confidential. Overall results will be made available
    on this page and they will also be posted to the regular libwww mailing
    list.

    Thanks for your comments and views!

    N.B. This survey doesn't mean that W3C plans to invest more resources on
    libwww or its further development. We expect this effort to come from the
    open source community.

    --------------------------------------------------------------

    Jose Kahan


--------------------------------------------------------------
List of References

Document's URL:  http://www.w3.org/Library/Survey2.html
[4] http://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/1/
[5] http://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/1/libwww/
[6] http://cgi.w3.org/MemberAccess/Public

Received on Tuesday, 2 September 2003 04:52:30 UTC