Subject: libwww-perl-5.00
From: [email-masked] (Gisle Aas)
Date: 29 May 1996 15:07:22 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl.announce,comp.lang.perl.misc

The first official version of libwww-perl for perl5 is now available.
Look for the libwww-perl-5.00.tar.gz distribution from your favorite
CPAN site (http://www.perl.com/CPAN/ is a good start if you don't have
a favorite yet).

Perl version 5.002 is required in order to install libwww-perl-5.00.
It is recommended that you also have the modules Net::FTP and MD5
installed.  These should also be available from CPAN.

Libwww-perl is a collection of Perl modules which provides a simple
and consistent programming interface (API) to the World-Wide Web.  The
main focus of the library is to provide classes and functions that
allow you to write WWW clients, thus libwww-perl said to be a WWW
client library. The library also contain modules that are of more
general use.

The main features of the library are:

  o  Contains various reuseable components (modules) that
     can be used separately or together.

  o  Provides an object oriented model of HTTP-style
     communication.  Within this framework we currently support access
     to http, gopher, ftp, news, file, and mailto resources.

  o  The library be used through the full object oriented
     interface or through a very simple procedural interface.

  o  Support the basic and digest authorization schemes.

  o  Transparent redirect handling.

  o  Supports access through proxy servers.

  o  URL handling (both absolute and relative URLs are
     supported).

  o  A parser for robots.txt files and a framework for
     construction of robots.

  o  An experimental HTML parser and formatters (for
     PostScript and plain text).

  o  The library can cooperate with Tk.  A simple Tk-based
     GUI browser called 'tkweb' is distributed with the Tk
     extention for perl.

  o  An implementation of the HTTP content negotiation
     algorithm that can be used both in protocol modules and
     in server scripts (like CGI scripts).

  o  A simple command line client application called lwp-
     request.
-- 
Gisle Aas                                         <[email-masked]>
Schibsted Nett AS                                 http://www.sn.no/~aas/