Hi
This may be a bit off your topic but it's still about sockets. I have never
played with this so am just asking through curiosity. My field of study and
work is in Exercise and Sports Science. In this field (and may others I
might add) there are a lot of gadgets as you would understand that fit to
port. Is it possible to read directly from these gadgets or is this only
possible if you know the messages they are sending. Is this legal if it
side-steps software designed buy the manufacturer of the gadget. I would be
quite interested to find out this kind of info for future reference. I am
really not up to it yet.
Regards
Monte
>From: Dave Cragg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Subject: sockets: a revelation
>Date: Fri, 3 Nov 2000 14:16:48 +0000
>
>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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>Please send bug reports to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, not this list.
>
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