[gopher] Gopher Connection Library ....

[Michael Casadevall <sonicmctails@xxxxxxx>]

Hey all,
I'm Michael, I'm new the list, although I'm an avid gopher user, I never
really got looking at gopher after it generally died out. I've recently
discovered gopher isn't dead (yet), and setup a gopher server for a game
I work on (gopher://castleinfinity.org).

I was sadden to find that Firefox is removing core Gopher support, I am
happy that Overbite is a great addon for expanding said support. I do
think though we need a lightweight standalone client; I remember reading
gopher sites in WSGopher, and it was quick and fast over 9600 bps. Even
though broadband is quite command, having a fast and lightweight
protocol and program to look up info would be great; some part of me
wants to convert wikipedia into a gopher site :-).

Anyway, on my way to creating a new client, I decided to create a very
general connection library to handle parsing and talking to gopher
servers, so that an actual client can be bolted on top fairly easily.
https://launchpad.net/libgopher . I hope to have a working base library
done fairly quickly since RFC 1463 is fairly straightforward to
implement. 

The eventual end of this project is to have a solid and simple gopher
client which is lightweight, and easy to use, and we could put on cell
phones (I have a little Windows Mobile programming experience, and I ope
to port the library to most smartphones and of course, the all important
iPhone). I also like to create a nice set of gopher pages made out of
large databases like wikipedia and the like to give these new gopher
clients something to connect to.

I also hope to implement gopher+, but that may not get done for some
time.
Michael.