WWW Programming Resources

Source code for Robots

I have the code for several robots which I downloaded from the web. These files are however not in a distribution form, so If you want to get the programs for your use at another site I ask that you look at the README file and then get them from the original site.

Here is the program URL_GET with its README file. This is written in PERL, with support for both versions 4 and 5.

Public Libraries for developing Network Applications

Most of these libraries were developed for WWW applications and servers, but have added support for other formats of information and applications. For example, Usenet News or Gopher.

C Language Libraries

The predominant open/free library for C that I know of is the libwww Reference Library project of the W3C organization. My copy of the User Manual can be found on this server and the library source code itself can be found here also.

Perl Language Libraries

I have found several differing Perl libraries, one which is highly comprehensive and several smaller ones. I recommend the Perl 5 version of Libwww although it is somewhat lacking in nice documentation the main file(LWP.pm) gives a good idea of how to use it.

NOTE: This is not currently running on the Research Suns because we only have perl 5.001 installed and this requires perl 5.002. I'm working on fixing this, but you CAN run it on hops.

The perl 4 library is less supported and somewhat more difficult to use since it can't take advantage of some nice perl 5 features, but it does have html documentation and is currently running.