Guile-WWW 2.33 available

[Thien-Thi Nguyen]

release notes:

  Big news is HTTP 1.1 cozying.  Better late than never.
  Focus is client-side at the moment; future releases will
  turn to server utils.

  Please also see the new "patronage" link, below.

  thi

README excerpt:

  This is the Guile WWW library, a set of Guile Scheme
  modules to facilitate HTTP, URL and CGI programming.

NEWS excerpt:

  - 2.33 | 2012-02-29

    - distribution now .tar.xz

        If you have GNU tar, you can use "tar xf" and it will DTRT.
        If not, you can use "xz -dc TARBALL | tar xf -" to unpack.

    - configure no longer checks for some widely-available modules

        The modules ‘(ice-9 and-let-star)’, ‘(ice-9 rdelim)’ and
        ‘(ice-9 regex)’ have been widely-available since Guile 1.4.x.

    - configure uses SNUGGLE for cross-Guile portability

        SNUGGLE is Free Software: <http://www.gnuvola.org/software/>.
        It provides ‘build-aux/snuggle.m4’, which is more amicable than
        the various ‘guile.m4’ in the wild.

    - dropped ‘(www server-utils answer) string<-header-components’

        This was pre-announced below in Guile-WWW 2.28 (2010-06-22).

    - changes to (www http)

      - bug fix: ‘http:request’ sends message body as-is

        This procedure used to erroneously send ‘CRLF’ after each string
        specified in BODY.  Now, it sends BODY only.

      - ‘http:status-ok?’ also accepts numeric arg

        E.g., ‘(http:status-ok? 200)’ and ‘(http:status-ok? "200")’
        both return ‘#t’.

      - ‘http:request’ also accepts a symbolic method

        Of course, a string is still acceptable.  Additionally, it is
        now an error if ‘method’ is neither string nor symbol.

      - new procs: ‘send-request’, ‘receive-response’

        These give (www http) a more asynchronous feel; it is now
        possible to implement pipelining, connection re-use, etc.
        Support for "chunked" transfer encoding and other HTTP 1.1 bits
        is built-in, although you can explicitly downgrade to 1.0 if you
        wish.

        Other features: (optional) caller-directed i/o to reduce data
        motion; support for ‘u8vector’ body (see example in the docs);
        support for custom body type; caller-specifiable header-name
        normalization; procedure names w/o "http:" prefix :-D.

      - message field types now documented

        The message object returned by ‘receive-response’ has a numeric
        status-code and header names normalized by the caller.

        In contrast, for backward compatability, the message object
        returned by ‘http:request’ has a string status-code and
        lower-case header names.

        (Header names are symbolic in any case.)

      - new fluid: protocol-version

        This affects how ‘http:request’ calls ‘send-request’ internally.
        It also impacts ‘http:get’, ‘http:head’, and ‘http:post-form’,
        which call ‘http:request’.

        The default value is ‘(1 . 0)’, i.e., HTTP 1.0.  The idea is to
        support backward compatability out of the box, but allow users
        to experimentally do:

          (set-fluid! protocol-version '(1 . 1))

        without having to modify their current code.  (New code
        should use ‘send-request’ and ‘receive-response’ directly.)
        This is a transitional feature of Guile-WWW 2.x; 3.x will
        drop ‘http:request’ (et al) along with the need for this
        fluid, entirely.

    - (www cgi) recognizes ‘application/x-www-form-urlencoded’ better

        Before, Content-Type recognition was over-constrained, failing
        to handle parameters (usually of the form "; charset=...").
        Things are now more relaxed.

    - documentation now explicitly UTF-8

        This has no immediate impact, but if you regenerate the .info,
        it may be possible that the makeinfo you use will generate nicer
        quotes, e.g., ‘foo’ instead of `foo'.  Time will tell.

    - maintenance: Autoconf 2.68, Automake 1.11.3, Guile-BAUX 20111227

home page:

  http://www.nongnu.org/guile-www/

patronage:

  http://www.gnuvola.org/patronage.html