# The WAIS to WWW gateway

Libwww supports direct WAIS access which means that applications using libwww can access WAIS servers. In order to do this you must have the following:

- Enable WAIS access in libwww before compiling
- Install the freeWAIS libraries from CNIDR. The version currently supported is freeWAIS 0.5

If you do not enable direct WAIS access, your application may still access WAIS servers through a HTTP-WAIS gateway.

## WSRC files

The gateway keeps a cache of WAIS "source" files. These are files describing WAIS servers, and are parsed, and are kept in the directory /usr/local/lib/WAIS under the server name, port, and database name.

They are normally picked up automatically by searching a directory of servers index. Once the gateway has picked up a description of a server, it uses the description to describe the server to those who follow links to it. (See the HTWSRC module in libwww)

## More Information

- Sun's version of freeWAIS documentation