Re: Important New Requirement for IPv4 Requests

[Joe Abley <jabley () hopcount ca>]

On 22 Apr 2009, at 10:42, Joe Greco wrote:

> While HTTP remains popular as a way to interact with humans,  
> especially if
> you want to try to do redirects, acknowledge license agreements,  
> etc., FTP
> is the file transfer protocol of choice for basic file transfer, and  
> can
> be trivially automated, optimized, and is overall a good choice for  
> file
> transfer.
>
> Does anyone know what "FTP" stands for, anyways?  I've always  
> wondered...

:-)

I was mainly poking at the fact that Bill seemed to be comparing SSL- 
wrapped file transfer with non-SSL-wrapped file transfer, but I'm  
intrigued by the idea that FTP without SSL might be faster than HTTP  
without SSL, since in my mind outside the minimal amount of signalling  
involved they both amount to little more than a single TCP stream.  
Bill sent me a link to a paper. I will read it.

However, I take some small issue with the assertion that FTP is easier  
to script than HTTP. The only way I have ever found it easy to script  
FTP (outside of writing dedicated expect scripts to drive clients,  
which really seems like cheating) is to use tools like curl, and I  
don't see why HTTP is more difficult than FTP as a protocol in that  
case. Perhaps I'm missing something.


Joe