[HECnet] Lynx

[Paul_Koning at Dell.com]

On Jan 29, 2013, at 10:43 AM, Johnny Billquist wrote:

On 2013-01-29 15:36, Brian Schenkenberger, VAXman- wrote:
Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> writes:

...
Well, the basic "problem" is that there is no http object defined in
DECnet, nor any equivalent to the http protocol, so how would you expect
it to work?

DECnet is not IP, nor TCP.

There are web servers for VMS and I believe you have one running on RSX.
The problem is not one of http but shipping that http over DECnet.   Get
the browser and web server speaking DECnet and you're 99% of the way to
the goal.

Certainly there are web servers for both VMS and RSX. None of them (to my knowledge) speaks DECnet. And then you need some browser that also speaks DECnet, and which agrees on the protocol.
There is a problem with the standard http protocol which makes it slightly tricky with DECnet.
http expects to be able to send empty lines. DECnet don't do that. DECnet sends records, and empty records don't get sent at all. I realized this when looking at the MAIL-11 protocol...
So we'd need to do some changes to the http protocol to adopt it on DECnet...

	Johnny

That should be completely trivial.   First, you assign an object number (pick a number -- 80 would be an obvious choice).   Then you send the data across a DECnet connection.   That too is easy.   Yes, DECnet sends packets, not just a dumb byte stream.   So it has structure, IF you need it.   If you don't, just pour the bytes into the packets and send them.   Ultrix does that -- its DECnet sockets have both a packet and a stream mode.   I'm not entirely sure how stream mode behaves; my guess would be that it just sticks the stream into packets whichever way is convenient.

As for the blank lines, that's not an issue.   A blank line is \r\n (or maybe just \n) but it certainly is not a null string.   So an HTTP request would live inside a packet that contains the text of the request, WITH the newline characters.

	paul