Hi all,
Sorry for this rambling mail, but I just had one of those "see the
light" experiences that leaves you feeling both like a genius and an
idiot at the same time.
Like others I guess, I've been trying to get to grips with the new
sockets features of Metacard, and seeing how these can be used for
various internet/intranet purposes. So I've been doing some reading
up of various internet protocols and tried to implement some
client-side http as part of this.
Anyway, all this attention to web protocols seems to have blinded me
to the basic concept of sockets. I've been approaching the whole
thing with the premise that it's necesary to use established
protocols (ftp, http, etc.) to use sockets. However, it just came to
me that client and server programs can communicate any way they like,
as long as they can understand each other.
I have to thank Brian (Yennie) of this list for this "discovery".
While browsing some old mails, I came across his scripts for checking
whether a computer was still online or not. I couldn't believe it was
that simple. ("accept connections on port 8080 with message whatever"
and your server application is running. Come on, Scott! This is
embarrassingly easy. Who's going to take this seriously? :))
I can see the importance of implementing established protocols if you
need to communicate widely, for example, to apache servers from
client Metacard programs or with web browsers from a Metacard server
program. However, my interest is with more restricted applications.
In particualr, with intranet-based training programs where a single
Metacard client program has to communicate with an intranet server
program to process results , be served lessons, tests, etc.
Instead of grappling with cgi scripting, web protocols and the like,
it seems all I have to do is put a Metacard program on an accessible
machine, set it to accept connections, and then basically implement a
set of matching read/write handlers at the client and server ends. A
private protocol, so to speak.
So my questions:
Is it really this easy, in principle at least?
What are the pitfalls?
Is Metacard ready for the big time in this regard? (I.e. will it run
all day on a server?)
Aplogies if all this is blindingly obvious.
Cheers
Dave Cragg
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