Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Firewalls, Hooray

Author:Nicholas Riley
Posted:5/6/2000; 9:18:58 AM
Topic:scriptingNews outline for 5/5/2000
Msg #:17077 (In response to 17061)
Prev/Next:17076 / 17078

The browser will probably say something like "The server is sending some data of type text/vnd.userland-pike that I've never heard of. What do you want to do? [Save file...] [Use plugin...] [Pick app...]" You click "Pick app..." and choose Pike, and then the browser sends it to Pike. Or the Pike installer could edit the user's MSIE and Netscape prefs to set it up.

A few thoughts. (Why is it that the fun stuff always has to come up when I'm amazingly busy?) I had the "browser produces file of special type" idea this morning too, but it seemed like it'd be too annoying to get the users to do the right thing consistently, not to mention I was a bit more concerned about finding whoever was responsible for the existence of 8 AM Saturday final exams. However, since the suffix mappings are controllable, it shouldn't be so bad.

- Frontier has had Internet Config support from a while ago, it shouldn't be hard to get it to write a suffix mapping. Pike can create the MIME type and suffix mapping in IC, it can set the "Post-Process" application to Pike, so just like StuffIt Expander will run on a .sit file, Pike will run on files of whatever MIME type you want to make it. Pike would need to check this on every startup, because the suffix mappings are per-Internet set.

- How about doing it with a shared menu? I've been pondering this for a while. You could have a Pike menu in the browser. The problem here is getting the username and password, since Pike will be making the first request of the server, before the server sends it any data. Maybe identification information (a unique ID, perhaps) could somehow be embedded in the editable page source, and Pike could read the text in the browser window, Fat Page-style? Then it could send the unique ID back to the server and it'd work as well as a username/password.

--Nicholas



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