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Apache Software

Gopher ProtocolHandler for Apache2 Released 51

Posted by michael from the go-fer-it dept.
hardburn writes "One of the stated goals of the Gopher Manifesto (previously mentioned on Slashdot) was to create a Gopher plugin for Apache. That goal has now been realized with the release of Apache::GopherHandler. Get it off Gopher itself or off CPAN."
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Gopher ProtocolHandler for Apache2 Released More

Gopher ProtocolHandler for Apache2 Released

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  • Thank Fucking Heavens (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 26, 2004 @11:20AM (#8679702)
    Finally!
    • Let's give my perspective.

      I remember a conference for the scandinavian internet (Helsinki '92, I think), where the WWW people made a presentation.

      I, and likely the rest of the audience, thought:
      "Bad English, damn -- wish I could understand better. Sounds really good. Pity that Gopher already has covered this niche... WWW won't win."

      The WWW did take off later (-: as you kids in the audience probably are aware of :-) when there was a viewer that could show images!

      I was happy that it took off (good fu

      • What I remember as the Gopher killer was that the team started off on a strange tangent with a 3D interface(?!).

        as i recall, the real gopher killer was when the University of Minnesota asserted that their patent on Gopher meant that people had to pay them in order to run a server. In the early 90's that was just shocking. My how the internet has changed.

  • the gopher url worked! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mzs ( 595629 ) on Friday March 26, 2004 @11:22AM (#8679726)
    I really cannot believe it. The last time I must have used gopher was probably sometime in the first half of the '90s. I did not even think that anyone was still using gopher, let alone the protocol was supported in the browser!!! I clicked the link in Safari and up popped IE and there were the files. It is somewhat eire that MS IE supports gopher though....

    (Just so that you all do not think I am some sort of freak, maybe the fact that I seem so excited in this post has something to do that I have been here at work since 6:30 and I am in the middle of 32 oz of coffee, or maybe I am just a freak after all.)

    Are there still any good places to check out with gopher?

  • Check your audience (Score:3, Insightful)

    by startup.cmd ( 765643 ) on Friday March 26, 2004 @11:23AM (#8679739)
    With Internet Explorer no longer supporting Gopher, what use is this? Mozilla, Opera, and the other Gopher-enabled browsers are not widely used by the public. Unless someone wants to keep the general public from visiting, it seems best to stick with old, reliable HTTP/server-side scripting.
    --

    • Re:Check your audience (Score:4, Funny)

      by lightspawn ( 155347 ) on Friday March 26, 2004 @11:35AM (#8679860) Homepage
      With Internet Explorer no longer supporting Gopher, what use is this?

      Don't you see? It's cool because it's like a secret.
    • Opera supports gopher? I can't get it open with it, had to use firefox.

  • Any advantage? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by crow ( 16139 ) on Friday March 26, 2004 @11:24AM (#8679750) Homepage Journal
    Is there really any advantage to using Gopher?

    The manifesto cites huge speed improvements, but I don't buy it. The manifesto assumes that people use gopher using web browsers as clients, so obviously they're not expecting any improvement in speed on the client side. They point out that gopher is a minimalist system; well, you can acheive that with HTML as well by using minimal markup (e.g., HTML 1.0 with no images).

    It seems that what they want is content without the fluff, and are therefore advocating a system that doesn't allow for the fluff instead of advocating using the more prevalent system and opting not to use the fluff.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday March 26, 2004 @11:38AM (#8679895)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • So in theory, if I put images up on a gopher server and in my web pages used gopher:// URLs to load them, then my page would load faster?

        Remeber that keep-alive is also useful for the ramp-up of the TCP flow control mechanism, not just the raw connection build-up/tear-down overhead.

    • Re:Any advantage? (Score:5, Informative)

      by hardburn ( 141468 ) <hardburn.wumpus-cave@net> on Friday March 26, 2004 @12:18PM (#8680330)

      One advantage is that any device can support Gopher without doing strange things to the text. Gopher orginizes everything in a heriarchal menu (tab-delimited), and then the client gets to do whatever it wants with it. You don't need to worry about "how does my page look on a PDA screen?", because a theoretical Gopher client on a PDA would already know how to format the output to be readable there. This is specifically because the Gopher protocol is dumb by design.

      Exploring neat ideas for interactions between Gopher servers and clients is my hidden goal behind this project. One idea I have is to make a backend repository for game ROMs that use Gopher+ INFO blocks to send the information on how to execute that ROM for a given emulator. Emulators that require special ROMs (such as MAME, which changes what is actually needed to execute a game in almost every new version) can be handled with Gopher+ VIEWS. But I'll have to get down to implementing Gopher+ before I can do that.

      I don't view Gopher as a replacement for the web, but as a nice augmentation in certain situations.

      • You don't need to worry about "how does my page look on a PDA screen?", because a theoretical Gopher client on a PDA would already know how to format the output to be readable there.

        I thought that was the original point of HTML? the webserver provides data and it's up to the client to present that data as it wishes, ie in any size window, ignoring some tags perhaps because it doesn't understand them, throwing all the presentation out of the window to read it to the blind websurfer etc.

        of course that most
      • If you use DIV and only basic HTML entities the user can easily (in a supporting browser) customize the appearance of your site with a style sheet - or you can.

    • None (Score:2)

      by fm6 ( 162816 )
      I think your perceptions are quite correct. What we have here is yet another technology that somebody can't bear to see die off. Nothing wrong with that (I myself have just wasted rather a lot of time playing with gopher software), but it's silly to pretend that anybody but a few enthusiasts are ever going to use Gopher. Even if the efficiency issue is real, no sane content provider is going to give up 90% of their audience just for a small improvement in transmission overhead.

      (I suppose you tell your po

      • You can't just write a page and stick it on your server

        Sure you can, depending on your server's configuration. Under the Apache handler, if you're using the Gopher::Server::RequestHandler::File handler, then you can just stick it in your directory structure. Other handlers (which have yet to be written) may or may not allow this, but if they don't, it'll be because they do complex things that need more information than what is available in the file itself.

        They're also a big reason web browser support

  • The 80's called... (Score:5, Funny)

    by infernalC ( 51228 ) <matthew@mellon.google@com> on Friday March 26, 2004 @11:35AM (#8679866) Homepage Journal
    ...they want their protocol back!

  • This is great... (Score:4, Funny)

    by samrolken ( 246301 ) <samrolken AT gmail DOT com> on Friday March 26, 2004 @11:38AM (#8679901)
    I'm glad to see some support for the gopher protocol. It's so necessary, considering the miserable failure of all kinds of other kind of online hypertext protocols, like the World Wide Web.

    --
    Sam Kennedy

  • *GOPHER is dying... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Ianoo ( 711633 ) on Friday March 26, 2004 @12:06PM (#8680189) Journal
    ... erm, never mind.

  • Email (Score:2, Funny)

    by pmeunier ( 713890 )
    Now we just need to get gopher-enabled email clients!
  • So... can I set up a mod_proxy under gopher and have it fetch http and gopher for me? That would be a true gopher.

    • There is a translater available that will convert a Gopher menu into HTML. But if you're running under Apache, you're probably better off switching off the directory indexer and pointing your document root to the same place as your Gopher server. It'll be almost the same thing as far as a standard desktop browser is concerned.

      If you're running PyGopherd (an excelent server written in Python), then it can automatically detect an HTTP request on the Gopher port and handle it correctly.

  • Here's a thought... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by tblease ( 721199 ) <tblease@bgnet.bgs[ ]du ['u.e' in gap]> on Friday March 26, 2004 @01:33PM (#8681148) Homepage
    Gopher would basically nullify any sort of annoying banner ads, flash pop-up ads, and (even worse) advertising internet apps [redsheriff.com] that seem to have found a niche on some of the bigger websites -- leaving you with just straight content (woo).

    However, gopher servers would still have the same cost issues that web servers have: server maintenance, bandwidth, etc. -- and without advertising it seems that it would be harder to keep up a gopher server. I understand that it takes less bandwidth and space to host gopher services, but even then if the server becomes excessively popular (ie. something along the lines of gopher://slashdot.org/) there still would be some costs incurred.

    Granted, advertising on webpages doesn't bring in as much as it used to -- but every little bit helps in the end, right?

    • Menu items noted with a '!' (upside-down 'i') type are information that can be displayed to the user. This would be far less obnoxious than the singing, dancing banner ads on the web today (saw one a few weeks ago with a ~20 sec mpeg embedded in it!), but would still generate a little revenue to support servers.

    • Gopher would basically nullify any sort of annoying banner ads, flash pop-up ads, and (even worse) advertising internet apps that seem to have found a niche on some of the bigger websites -- leaving you with just straight content

      So does running Lynx as your browser. Nothing like watching some Dreamweaver-spawned, ad-laden behemoth of a page get reduced to a two second download. Mmmm.

  • Like other posters..i hadn't thought about GOPHER in a long long time... It is the salvation of the Internet, it's time for it to make its comeback!!! Who's with me!! Let's setup a GOPHER friendly version of /. !!!

  • Well... that's a first for me... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by WoTG ( 610710 ) on Friday March 26, 2004 @09:33PM (#8686252) Homepage Journal
    Thanks to that Gopher link, I can now claim to have used Gopher.... Hmm... is that good resume fodder? =)

    What's next? Archie?

    • You must mean Veronica... (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Archie is (or was) an indexing system for FTP servers. Veronica is the name of the search program used for Gopher data.
  • I wondered where he went after The Love Boat went off the air. Now he appears out of nowhere to plug Apache. [ducks]

  • Slashdot over Gopher! (Score:3, Funny)

    by stevenp ( 610846 ) on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @11:04AM (#8725170)
    Slashdot over gopher is working [slashdot.org]! Only the content is a little bit limited
  • Sigh... Yet another protocol blocked by our corporate firewall.
  • A buddy of mine worked for an outfit where the network nazis only allowed http and https traffic to the outside world. So he wrote an application with a java terminal interface to give him a shell on a remote computer. Java applet runs in browser, transfers keystrokes and characters using https, server app interfaces with a shell.
  • Honestly, at this stage of the game, is gopher even relevant?

    If it is, then cool. But I don't know what its value is today...

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