wgrab / News: Recent posts

With the realization that the ptypes library (http://sourceforge.net/projects/ptypes/) is no longer maintained, it has been decided that the best course of action for wgrab is to move to another library. With that in mind, some time ago I began developing a c++ sockets library which would not only have a license which is compatible with wgrab, but one that would also be able to replace larger, more bloated libraries in other software that is under development. Hopefully, we'll all be able to see not only speed increases in network communication, but also reduced file sizes. (The original wgrab was designed around embedded and lightweight distributions as it's primary audience, but on certain systems the ptypes library can be quite large, making it pointless.) With great conviction, the goal has become 20 kilobytes yet again.

Apparently there are some issues with building either ptypes or wgrab under Gentoo 2005.1. I'm looking into this issue to attempt to build an ebuild for the distribution. Additionally, if someone is willing to generate an rpm package for wgrab, the help would be appreciated.

This is amazingly incredible. Either my programming skills (while sometimes sloppy) are incredibly reliable, or the bugs are so elusive that noone has yet noticed them. I'm not sure if that's actually good...or bad. If you notice anything, please feel free to let me know of any bugs you might find. As of right now wgrab is taking a backburner to my current project...moving. I'll be moving near the end of the month, and looking for a home in one of the most overpriced places in the US has been interesting to say the least.

So I've been working towards getting wgrab to return the same codes that wget does, so that it may better be integrated with existing tools that use wget as their primary web fetching utility.
If anyone can provide a list of at least a few (if everyone just provided one, I'm sure the list would be very complete) of the return codes, and their reason, it would make compliance much more simple. I might create a simple ftp grabbing utility also, with the same goals in mind. (small executable, fast, etc)

Fixed a few typographical errors, as well as added checking for if a hostname was supplied. Read changelog for full details.

This was a hefty update, and added some great functionality as well as modifying some existing functionality.

Added HTTP 1.1 support, albeit a bit slower; added error checking (response messages) and the ability to ignore them; added other items not worth adding here. See the ChangeLog for full details.

So I was doing some testing of wgrab, and decided to see if it was comparable to wget speedwise. I found that when I tested wgrab, it was approximately 30% faster than wget. It's quite possible that this may have been a freak occurrence, but it certainly put a smile on my face. Please submit any speed tests you do to the Open Discussion forum here on SF.net or on my site, www.xero-soft.com. I'd like to see other peoples comparisons. I'll probably put up a simple shell script for download so people can test it themselves using a standard method.

wgrab 1.1.1 was released, adding the --timeout and --port command line options, see the changelog for full details.