It was originally part of a soap (simple object access protocol) implementation called soup, but the soap and non-soap parts have now been split into separate packages.

libsoup uses the glib main loop and is designed to work well with gtk+ applications. this enables gnome applications to access http servers on the network in a completely asynchronous fashion, very similar to the gtk+ programming model (a synchronous operation mode is also supported for those who want it).

features:
* both asynchronous (gmainloop and callback-based) and synchronous apis
* automatically caches connections
* ssl support using gnutls
* proxy support, including authentication and ssl tunneling
* client support for digest, ntlm, and basic authentication
* server support for digest and basic authentication
* basic client-side soap and xml-rpc support
this package contains the development files.