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 or simply the Web) is an information system that enables Content (media), content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond Information technology, IT specialists and hobbyis ...

. libwww-perl provides an

application programming interface An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software Interface (computing), interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that des ...

(API) to an

HTTP HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) 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 Web, wher ...

client as well as a number of

HTML Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...

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 high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language". Perl was developed ...

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

Web crawler 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 spider ...

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

Tim Berners-Lee Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955), also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web, the HTML markup language, the URL system, and HTTP. He is a professorial research fellow a ...

's work on

libwww Libwww is an early World Wide Web software library providing core functions for web browsers, implementing HTML, HTTP, and other technologies. Tim Berners-Lee, at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), released libwww (then also ca ...

, 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

and Gisle Aas. The current version is 6.72.LWP on MetaCPAN
/ref>

References

External links

LWP on GitHub

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