W3C has stopped work on Libwww and invites the libwww user community to participate in a Future of Libwww Survey 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.

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 survey. 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. 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. Original URL: http://www.w3.org/Library/Survey2.html