Re: FTP in the Finder
Re: FTP in the Finder
- Subject: Re: FTP in the Finder
- From: Quinn <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 29 Mar 2002 09:59:36 +0000
At 22:41 -0500 28/3/02, Jason Linhart wrote:
I don't get why people keep saying it can't be done. It has already been
done on Windows.
It's not that I don't think it can be done, it's that I don't think
that users will want the product once you've made all the compromises
necessary to make it work.
The problem is that the Mac system software, Finder, and applications
all assume that disk drives are local, and hence do a large number of
round trips to the drive. This is fine for local networks, where the
latencies are low, but breaks down horribly for wide area networks.
For example, mounting an AFP server at Apple from my home office
presents a horrendous user experience. As a further example, folks
have commented that iDisk over WedDAV is slow. My guess is that if
you look at the packets on the wire you'll see that this slowness is
not the fault of either the client or the server, but of the network
latency between them.
Having said that, I don't want to actively discourage developers from
create killer apps, so I'll give you my suggestions for how to make
it work best.
1. Only try this on Mac OS X.
2. For your initial version, make the file system read-only. This
feature allows the following two features.
3. Don't advertise any resource folks.
4. Synthesise all meta-data locally. Don't try and parse MacBinaries
to create meta-data etc.
5. Use FTP's RESUME command.
6. Don't do any in-kernel work. Instead create a WebDAV to FTP
gateway and rely on Mac OS X's built-in WebDAV VFS plug-in to handle
all the in-kernel stuff. You should just create an HTTP server that
supports the WebDAV extensions that then proceeds to fetch the file
from FTP. That way your entire product runs in user space, which
makes it much easier to write and debug (fewer reboots).
7. If necessary you can take the open source WebDAV VFS plug-in and
modify it slightly to accomodate goals 2 through 4.
S+E
--
Quinn "The Eskimo!" <
http://www.apple.com/developer/>
Apple Developer Technical Support * Networking, Communications, Hardware
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