[gopher] Re: Gopher server-side programming

[emanuel at heatdeath organisation <emanuel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> What I haven't done before is implemented a non-HTTP servlet.  I'm not
> digging the idea of writing the gopher equivalent of jserv.

Aw come on, it'd be fun!  :-)

I don't know what would be better: trying to tie servlets in with an
existing gopher server, or writing a gopher server from scratch that
supports servlets.

I haven't dug into gopher servers much, but I'm definitely not very
happy from user's perspective with any of the servers I've tried,
especially when it comes to Gopher+ support and programmability.  

Actually implementing gopher support for servlets would be fairly easy,
I think, and getting it hooked to an existing server wouldn't
necessarily be that difficult either (depending on how good the code of
the server is).

I think writing a fully Gopher+ supporting gopher server would be more
difficult.  But even that wouldn't be so much harder than writing a
client, and it only took me a couple of days of coding to get the
protocol part of a client written (with full Gopher+ support).

Altogether, I think writing a Gopher+ implementation in Java that uses
Servlets for everything would be the easiest approach.  Then a Servlet
could be written to implement UMN gopherd-like file and directory
serving from the file system. 

Probably the most challenging part would be speccing out the API for a
Gopher Servlet.

The more I think about it, the more fun it sounds!

-- 
emanuel at heatdeath organisation
gopher.heatdeath.org