RE: New to list - big question

WinInet certainly saves you some trouble, but you still have to know about
HTTP. It only makes your job a little easier.

However, WinInet carries a HEAVY cost if you are going to distribute a
product based on it. The ONLY way you can redistribute WinInet.dll with your
software is to carry at least a custom (royalty-free!!!) installation of
Internet Explorer with your software distribution. If your client needs
10MB, you probably will end up putting may be 50 MB on your customer's disk!

To be fair, WinInet.dll comes bundled with recent ships of Windows - Win2k,
NT 4 SP3 on, etc. But your product still needs to work on older Windows, &
anyway you might be using a later version of WinInet.dll than your host
system has.

Your other alternatives are these open-source products - Netscape's
(Mozilla's?) "netlib" & (probably) W3C's "libwww". I've not used either,
though.

And look for HTTP/1.1 docs rather than HTTP/1.0.

Manoj Dhooria
Geometric Software [www.geometricsoftware.com]
Bombay

-----Original Message-----
From: Jon Edwards [mailto:jedwards@sofsol.com]
Sent: Saturday, August 26, 2000 12:30 AM
To: 'www-talk@w3.org'
Subject: New to list - big question


Hello all,

This is my first post to the list, so please bear with me.

I am a programmer working with a 4GL language that runs on Microsoft
operating systems.  What I need to do is use this 4GL to send HTTP messages
to a web server and then receive the responses and act accordingly.  After
considering this for a few days it seems I have two options.  The first is
to use Microsoft's wininet.dll and not worry about socket-level issues or
the inner workings of this thing called "HTTP."  The second option (the one
that I prefer) is to not rely on Microsoft, make use the socket
read/write/listen/etc functions provided by my 4GL and implement my own
scaled down HTTP client.

I'm not interested in the GUI/HTML aspects of web browsers, style sheets or
anything like that.  All I need to do is send HTTP requests to a CGI or ASP
script on a web server and receive/decode the response(s).

I've tried to find the HTTP 1.0 spec at www.w3.org but it looks like it's
been archived(?).  Can anyone recommend some resources that will help
explain exactly what is involved in writing my own HTTP client?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Jon Edwards
jedwards@sofsol.com

Received on Monday, 28 August 2000 02:33:13 UTC