[Pipet Devel] http protocol, was: J.W. Bizzaro; TODO 20000218

[Gary Van Domselaar]

Brad Chapman wrote:

> I will admit that I don't know *anything* about how http works, or
> even the first place to get started (maybe Gary can give me some
> clues?) but for right now I'll have the communication go on via a
> reciever and sender class on each side, and then I can start to
> incoporate http later.

I'm not an http expert either; I merely proposed it because it is the
default communication protocol for XML transfer, and web-browsers use
it.  When we get XML compliant web browsers, then we can connect
browsers to a loci engine.  The crappy part about this is that, in order
to manipulate the DOM, we're stuck with java/javascript.  I dont know of
any other way to do client-side processing through a browser, if there
is I would love to hear about it.  Honestly, the whole web-interface
idea may be too much for us right now, although I know Dr. Lapointe is
interested, as is my roommate (who would like to participate in this
aspect of Loci's interface).  

Newayz, here is the url to look at for the http rfc:

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/

Here's a little snippet from the latest rfc2126 (http/1.1):

<snip>

______Abstract

   The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application-level
   protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information
   systems. It is a generic, stateless, protocol which can be used for
   many tasks beyond its use for hypertext, such as name servers and
   distributed object management systems, through extension of its
   request methods, error codes and headers [47]. A feature of HTTP is
   the typing and negotiation of data representation, allowing systems
   to be built independently of the data being transferred.

...

1.4 Overall Operation

   The HTTP protocol is a request/response protocol. A client sends a
   request to the server in the form of a request method, URI, and
   protocol version, followed by a MIME-like message containing request
   modifiers, client information, and possible body content over a
   connection with a server. The server responds with a status line,
   including the message's protocol version and a success or error code,
   followed by a MIME-like message containing server information, entity
   metainformation, and possible entity-body content.

Regards,

g.
-- 
                                  Gary Van Domselaar
                               gary at bioinformatics.org
                          http://www.bioinformatics.org/~gary
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