Message-Id: <200201152320.AAA16942@um1b.pce.de>
Date: Wed, 16 Jan 2002 00:24:51 +0100
To: gopher@complete.org
From: Wolfgang Zekoll <wzk@happy-ent.de>
Subject: [gopher] Re: Antwort: Re: finally i find other gopherfans... (gn
 maintainer)
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Hello gopher users,

I've been reading this list for several days and perhaps it's time to do a
first post.  Some days ago someone asked for gopher features, I have some in
my mind.

First of all I think the more interesting part in gopher is gopher+. I didn't
understand this when the developers from Minnesota came up with this idea but
I think that today I do.  Since there are working gopher+ clients other than the
Minnesota client I think about creating a gopher+ --> HTML gateway, perhaps
using frames and javascript.  Ok, running a web browser on gopher server is
a little bit oversized but since most users will do, why not take the browser's
features?  By the way, I think users looking in gopherspace would prefer a real
gopher client if available.  But it seems that the good old wsgopher doesn't
work on the current 32bit Windows platforms.

The second thing is about clustering.  Imagine you are running 5 different
gopher servers with different content.  A client searching something in your
gopherspace could submit the query to one of your servers which would then
query the others and return the results in a single menu to the client.  This
should easily work because gopher search results look always the same.  But ok,
we won't have gopher clusters at least not this year.

But what about peer-to-peer networking like it's done in gnutella?  The client
connects to a p2p server which forwards the request into a peer network and
returns the results to the client (so the client doesn't have to take care
about the fact that he is searching a peer network).  If the client wants to
fetch an item from the network it does this directly with the server having
the file.  I'm sure you have the idea.

Right now I'm working on my own gopher server for Linux (I just want to know
if I can do it).  After I have brought it into a stable and working release
I'll perhaps look more detailed at p2p networking for gopher.

Regards

Wolfgang Zekoll