HTTP


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HyperText Transfer Protocol

Yeah yeah, you know about it. TBL and everything. The original HTTP was just... throw a connect at a host, tell him GET this or that, then you receive the file as is and the socket is closed, which means that all the time TCP needed to get its window size properly set was thrown away as for the next click a new connection is made.

HTTP was designed with an idea in mind, a vision, the same vision that led us to the URL (we call it a uniform) concept and the HTML. And yet over the years it got fixed up quite impressively and now even serves the job of a File Transfer protocol better than FTP (that's one of the reasons why we'd like to have an HTTP Server built into PsycZilla).

So what does this really have to do with PSYC? Well, as Larry Masinter suggested, psyced and the early WWW have one thing in common: they support most existing technologies, before coming up with a new one. That was easy with Gopher and WAIS, but won't be with IRC and XMPP. What else?

psyced comes with a builtin HTTP-Server that features a little CMS based on textdb. It is also a good framework for dynamic web applications, especially when they involve multi-user interaction or realtime aspects like pushing data and yes, even AJAX and Comet are fancy newer words for things that symlynX has been doing with psyced Webchat technology since 1997.

In psyced, persons can define content for their web profile and be customized using style sheets, so can places. With the advent of PsycZilla we even have web applications that do not use HTTP at all, because the HTML content is delivered directly via PSYC. This could lead to a truly Private Web.

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the POST superhighway

For clients behind firewalls we are planning to support the POST superhighway as Jim Gettys once called it. I'll fill you in on the details at a later time, although symlynX servers already support it. Essentially, you can access any interface protocol from the HTTP port.

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See also

Retrieved from "http://about.psyc.eu/HTTP"