On Fri, 27 Jun 2008 11:55:05 am John Summerfield wrote:
> http lacks that convenience, but really comes into play when
> distributing files to remote, usually anonymous and untrusted, users.
It surprises and amazes me what shapes simple old HTTP has been bent into. :)
Thanks to extensions like WebDAV, HTTP provides a transport that does a lot
more than just serve static HTML. SSL and TLS mean that it can do so
securely.
> The nearest Linux/Unix have is NFS, but again that lacks the convenience
> (from the users' viewpoint) of CIFS and AFP.
You're forgetting newer methods of delivering *information* rather than just
files. This is what David is getting at: the servers that support UNC naming
only support pointing to a file and doing I/O. URLs literally point at
information: files containing data, applications that can obtain data and
present it as a file, web services that can aggregate information from
various locations, and so on.
Also, don't forget that URL != HTTP. A URL starts with the transport to be
used to satisfy the request: HTTP is just the most common use of URLs.
There's nfs://, ssh://, ftp://, and plenty more... and if you need to mimic
UNCs, there's smb:// (or cifs://) too.
> If you say, "It's just sloppy architecture" then you are judging
> yesterday's best practice by today's standards. It was created for LANs
> of small computers - Pentiums, and 486s and less.
Maybe it wasn't "sloppy architecture" in its day. Tom's request landed in
2008 though, not in 1990. For a new solution being implemented in an
organisation today technologies must be measured against what is available
today, and in that environment UNC naming has to be found wanting.
When this system goes live, I'd predict that one of the first questions that
will arise is "why can't I view these documents on my ${PDA}?" I expect that
question would be a lot harder to answer if UNC is used... ;-)
Cheerio,
Vic Cross
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