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Date: Thu, 27 Oct 2011 17:55:02 +0200
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To: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org
Subject: [DISCUSS] replace neon with libwww (preferred) or libcurl (as 2.
 choice)
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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/