Hi,
i will continue my evaluation of libwww [1] as a replacement for the
neon library that we can't use in the future because of the LGPL license.
libwww would be the preferred replacement because of the WebDAV support.
"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 complete HTTP/1.1 (with
caching, pipelining, PUT, POST, Digest Authentication, deflate, etc),
MySQL logging, FTP, HTML/4, XML (expat), RDF (SiRPAC), WebDAV, and much
more."
The license is BSD like and i was already in contact with one of the
developers and they would be interested to grant it to Apache if there
is enough interest to work on it in the future. It looks like an
inactive project but they still receive patches from time to time and it
is used in several projects. Well it is a complete implementation of a
standard (HTTP 1.1) and besides bugfixes probably not too many things to
do. Ok there is still room for improvements in some areas...
Having such a HTTP client library written in C might be a good
enhancement or extension of an existing Apache project. As far as i know
there exists only Java based HTTP client libraries. Or as an own top
level project if enough interested people are available.
Anyway i will check if we can use it as a replacement for neon and based
on the fact that it supports FTP as well, we can perhaps replace libcurl
in then future too. But that is not so important at this time.
If anybody is interested to help with this effort you are welcome.
Beside the reimplementation of the WebDAV UCP (handles all http file
access today) we have to integrate libwww in our build env as other
external libs on all the supported platforms.
If the evaluation fails and we can't use it we can use libcurl for plain
http file access. And can later focus on WebDAV by using Apaches own
stuff implemented in Java.
Any opinions or objections others than Java is bad?
Juergen
[1] http://www.w3.org/Library/
