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Re: FTP in the Finder
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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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 >Re: FTP in the Finder (From: Jason Linhart <email@hidden>)

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