LWP - The World-Wide Web library for Perl (also called libwww-perl) is a set of

Perl module A Perl module is a discrete component of software for the Perl programming language. Technically, it is a particular set of conventions for using Perl's package mechanism that has become universally adopted. A module defines its source code to ...

s that give Perl programming easy access to sending requests to the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web ...

. libwww-perl provides an application programming interface (API) to an

HTTP The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide We ...

client as well as a number of

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaSc ...

utilities, and standard objects to represent HTTP requests and responses.

History

The first generation of libwww-perl was written by

Roy Fielding Roy Thomas Fielding (born 1965) is an American computer scientist, one of the principal authors of the HTTP specification and the originator of the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style. He is an authority on computer network ...

using version 4.036 of

Perl Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6, before the latter's name was offic ...

. Fielding's work on libwww-perl provided a backend HTTP interface for his MOMSpider

Web crawler A Web crawler, sometimes called a spider or spiderbot and often shortened to crawler, is an Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web and that is typically operated by search engines for the purpose of Web indexing (''web spid ...

. Fielding's work on libwww-perl was informed by Tim Berners-Lee's work on

libwww Libwww was an early World Wide Web software library providing core functions for browsers, implementing HTML, HTTP, and other technologies. Tim Berners-Lee, at CERN, released libwww (then also called the "Common Library") in late 1992, comprising ...

, and helped to clarify the architecture of the Web that was eventually documented in

v1.0. The second generation of libwww-perl was based on version 5.004 of Perl, and written by

Martijn Koster Martijn Koster (born ca 1970) is a Dutch software engineer noted for his pioneering work on Internet searching. Koster created ALIWEB, the Internet's first search engine, which was announced in November 1993 while working at Nexor and presente ...

and Gisle Aas. The current version is 6.33.LWP on MetaCPAN
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References

External links

LWP on GitHub

The book ''Perl & LWP'', free online
Perl modules {{compu-library-stub