gnucash/lib/guile-www

This is an alpha release of the Guile WWW library, version 1.0.



Roadmap:



The (www http) library includes some support for navigating HTTP

connections.  http:open, http:request and http:get may be used for

opening connections and making HTTP requests; http:make-message,

http:message-body and http:message-header may be used to

manipulate HTTP messages.  Support is planned for the full

HTTP/1.1 protocol, including cookies and persistent connections.



(www url) provides url:parse for parsing a URL into its component

parts, and the selector functions url:scheme, url:host, url:port

and url:path for selecting individual components of a parsed URL.

For individual components that may have been URL-encoded in

transit, url:decode translates a string into its raw (unencoded)

form.



(www cgi) provides some functions helpful in writing CGI scripts

painlessly.  The focus is on scripts to process interactive forms.

cgi:init reads any form data and initializes a CGI environment.

cgi:form-data? determines whether any form data has been returned

by a browser for processing.  cgi-value returns the value

associated with a form variable, and cgi-names and cgi-values

return all of the names and values present in the current form.



(www main) provides www:get, which decodes a URL and invokes the

appropriate protocol handler for retrieving the desired object.

It is intended to be a generic interface useful for retriving data

named by any URL.



wwwcat is an example script of how www:get and other functions

might be used by a Guile application.



A generic guide to hacking on Guile software follows.



Tim Pierce

twp@tezcat.com



Hacking It Yourself ==================================================



As distributed, the Guile WWW library needs only a Unix system to build

and install.  However, its makefiles, configuration scripts, and a few

other files are automatically generated, not written by hand.  If you

want to make changes to the system (which we encourage!) you will find

it helpful to have the tools we use to develop it.  They are the

following:



Autoconf 2.12 --- a system for automatically generating `configure'

	scripts from templates which list the non-portable features a

	program would like to use.  Available in

	"ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu".



Automake 1.1p --- a system for automatically generating Makefiles that

	conform to the (rather Byzantine) GNU coding standards.  The

	nice thing is that it takes care of hairy targets like 'make

	dist' and 'make distclean', and automatically generates

	Makefile dependencies.  Available in

	"ftp://ftp.cygnus.com/pub/tromey".



libtool 0.9d --- a system for managing the zillion hairy options needed

	on various systems to produce shared libraries.  Available in

	"ftp://alpha.gnu.ai.mit.edu/gnu".



You are lost in a little maze of automatically generated files, all

different.