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Gopher ProtocolHandler for Apache2 Released

Posted by michael on 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."

51 comments

  1. Thank Fucking Heavens by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    Finally!

  2. the gopher url worked! by mzs · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:the gopher url worked! by hardburn · · Score: 4, Interesting

      gopher.quux.org is a huge repository (many of the quotes you see at the top of my site came out of QUUX's fortune files). I eventually plan on expanding gopher.wumpus-cave.net into a repository for weird or historical technology (Trebuchets built out of Legos, PDP-11 assembler opcodes, etc.), but right now it just has some Gopher implementations and some pictures of a burning stuffed Barney doll :)

      --
      Not a typewriter
    2. Re:the gopher url worked! by Rtsbasic · · Score: 1

      Mozilla Firebird still supports Gopher as well.
      This could be useful with mobile devices - the formatting is done completely client side, and with no overhead its perfectly suited to mobile clients.

    3. Re:the gopher url worked! by Feztaa · · Score: 0, Redundant

      Firefox works with Gopher, too.

    4. Re:the gopher url worked! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yes, but even Firefox works with Gopher.

      BTW: I have just tested if Firefox works with Gopher: it does!

      Also note that Mozilla Firefox is reported to work with Gopher.

  3. Check your audience by startup.cmd · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
    --

    1. Re:Check your audience by lightspawn · · Score: 3, Funny

      With Internet Explorer no longer supporting Gopher, what use is this?

      Don't you see? It's cool because it's like a secret.

    2. Re:Check your audience by genner · · Score: 1

      Opera supports gopher? I can't get it open with it, had to use firefox.

    3. Re:Check your audience by startup.cmd · · Score: 0
      Well, according to Opera's website, their browser requires a proxy for Gopher URLs. They say its used to translate the Gopher protocol into HTTP.

      --

  4. Any advantage? by crow · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Any advantage? by AKnightCowboy · · Score: 0, Interesting
      Is there really any advantage to using Gopher?

      Are there any advantages to taking the guts of your X-Box out of it's original case and putting it into some tricked out custom transparent case with neon lighting? No, not really. Bored people do odd things. Gopher has zero use anymore with HTTP and other protocols. It's obsolete.

    2. Re:Any advantage? by squiggleslash · · Score: 4, Informative
      There's quite a lot of crap that gets sent with your HTML pages with HTTP, so you can easily end up with as much in headers sent to and from your browser as you have content. Gopher contains no headers of any kind - indeed, file type information is included in the URLs and the URLs are minimal when you're using Gopher's built in menus (ie no description&lt/a&g t - you're literally just sending what IIRC is a simple CSV file containing hostandfile,type,description (it's been a while, I can't remember the exact format.) Getting a gopher page is literally a matter of connecting to the Gopher port, sending the name of the page you want, and reading what comes back until the connection closes. You don't send additional information, the server doesn't send additional information.

      Really it depends on the application whether you're going to want to use Gopher. If you have very little bandwidth to spare, and HTTP's keep-alive would not do enough to minimize the header/HTML overhead, Gopher can certainly help and will almost certainly be an improvement to end users.

      How likely you are to be in such a situation however is open to question.
      --
      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
    3. Re:Any advantage? by crow · · Score: 1

      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.

    4. Re:Any advantage? by hardburn · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

      --
      Not a typewriter
    5. Re:Any advantage? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

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

      Well said. It does not see any widespread use, but it still has many practical uses.

    6. Re:Any advantage? by fyonn · · Score: 1

      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 mostly seems out of the window now although I suppose there is still a bit of it left with client side css pages modding the webpages you're viewing (I have one that strips out lots of ads)

      dave

    7. Re:Any advantage? by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  5. The 80's called... by infernalC · · Score: 4, Funny

    ...they want their protocol back!

    1. Re:The 80's called... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      Karma-whores called. They want their over-used joke back.

    2. Re:The 80's called... by macdaddy · · Score: 1

      Your village called. They want their idiot back.

  6. This is great... by samrolken · · Score: 4, Funny

    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

    --
    samrolken
    1. Re:This is great... by cloudmaster · · Score: 1

      Yeah, I'm a big fan of the World Wide Web protocol. ;)

  7. *GOPHER is dying... by Ianoo · · Score: 2, Funny

    ... erm, never mind.

    1. Re:*GOPHER is dying... by Tin+Foil+Hat · · Score: 1

      Not dying, dead. Somebody call the GhostBusters.

      Seriously though, I wonder if gopher could be used effectively on RF networks for set-top boxes. That could be very useful for a terminally bandwidth-limited project I'm working on right now.

      --
      No matter how many of my rights are taken away, somehow I still don't feel safe. -Frigid Monkey
    2. Re:*GOPHER is dying... by fm6 · · Score: 1

      Imagine a beowulf cluster of dying BSD trolls all surfing Gopher!

  8. Email by pmeunier · · Score: 2, Funny

    Now we just need to get gopher-enabled email clients!

  9. Real Gopher=mod_proxy+ mod_gopher by delorean · · Score: 1
    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.

    --
    "You may all go to hell and I will go to Texas"
     Sen. Davy Crocket to US Congress, Nov. 1, 1835
    1. Re:Real Gopher=mod_proxy+ mod_gopher by hardburn · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

      --
      Not a typewriter
  10. Here's a thought... by tblease · · Score: 3, Insightful
    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 (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?

    --
    huzzah
    1. Re:Here's a thought... by hardburn · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      Not a typewriter
    2. Re:Here's a thought... by Black+Jack+Hyde · · Score: 1
      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.

  11. None by fm6 · · Score: 1
    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 potential audience to access your site via a Gopher gateway. But is it worth the hassle?)

    I also have some issues with the gopher protocol as such. You can't just write a page and stick it on your server. You have to follow a lot of strange little rules for integrating it into the menu structure. These complications have a lot to do with gopher's lack of acceptance,

    They're also a big reason web browser support is so poor. The only browser that fully supports the protocol is Lynx. Mozilla/Netscape has a half-assed implementation they inherited from Mosaic, which they never seem to have updated. IE used to have the same code, but has since stripped it out. Opera claims to support gopher if you configure it to use a proxy server-- a concept I don't quite understand and lack any inclination to test.

    Should browser vendors support Gopher (better)? Perhaps. Put let's do some prioritizing here. There are a lot of things we need to get browser vendors to do. Better support for W3C specs has to be a major focus Support for legacy protocols that a few enthusiasts won't give up on just isn't worth anybody's energy.

    1. Re:None by hardburn · · Score: 1

      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 is so poor.

      If you're talking about desktop browsers, sure. But what about my cell phone, which is fully Internet connected? Using HTTP+HTML, I have to do all sorts of things to my markup to get it to look right, and the result will probably look too minimalistic on a desktop browser. With a Gopher client, the cell phone's client would be able to format the menu on it's own.

      --
      Not a typewriter
  12. Incorrect by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    IE 6 supports gopher fine.

    1. Re:Incorrect by startup.cmd · · Score: 1
      One of Microsoft's patches back in 2002 removed Gopher support. The only way to return it is to create a new registry value that switches it back on. Here's the registry key, a dword value of 0x1:
      HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Cur rentVersion\Internet Settings\EnableGopher
      Perhaps you specifically created this key yourself or your adminstrator at your workplace did it. For the general novice public, they wouldn't be able to get into any gopher pages.

      --

    2. Re:Incorrect by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I am getting into gopher pages without any problem. No sort of regediting was necessary. Right now I am on a Win98se with IE 6.0.2800.1106.

    3. Re:Incorrect by WaterTroll · · Score: 1

      In addition to the first reply, take a look at the proxy settings for IE, I am using 6.0 and I still see a text box for a gopher proxy, and I am also having no problem without using any registry modifications.

  13. GOPHER is BACK baby!!! by darthcamaro · · Score: 0, Redundant

    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 /. !!!

  14. Well... that's a first for me... by WoTG · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Thanks to that Gopher link, I can now claim to have used Gopher.... Hmm... is that good resume fodder? =)

    What's next? Archie?

  15. Hey, don't knock it! :-) I think by BerntB · · Score: 1
    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 functionality) but disgusted that ephemeral garbage like showing images was the reason.

    I do think that the Gopher manifesto do have some points...

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

    If they instead had concentrated on extending the protocol and functionality (making RPC:s out of it?), then history could certainly have taken another path.

    --
    Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
    1. Re:Hey, don't knock it! :-) I think by tanguyr · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      #!/usr/bin/english
  16. Gopher Returns! by UnknowingFool · · Score: 1

    I wondered where he went after The Love Boat went off the air. Now he appears out of nowhere to plug Apache. [ducks]

    --
    Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
  17. You must mean Veronica... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Archie is (or was) an indexing system for FTP servers. Veronica is the name of the search program used for Gopher data.

  18. Slashdot over Gopher! by stevenp · · Score: 2, Funny

    Slashdot over gopher is working! Only the content is a little bit limited

  19. Of course there is the Firewall issue by sakshale · · Score: 1

    Sigh... Yet another protocol blocked by our corporate firewall.

    --
    For every problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious and wrong.
  20. bash over https by Webmoth · · Score: 1

    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.

    --
    Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
    1. Re:bash over https by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How much easier is this then simply running ssh on port 80?

    2. Re:bash over https by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Maybe he tried that but the network admin said

      "Wait a minute...this isn't http traffic...shut 'er down, boys!"

  21. Not what he was asking for by macdaddy · · Score: 1

    You need to read between the lines in what he wrote. What he's asking for is where can he find some good quality Gopher Porn. If memory serves me correctly that particular niche of beastiality is illegal everywhere but Arkansas, Utah and Washington, DC. Oh, I almost forgot. It's still legal by local ordinance in Boca Raton, Florida, legislation bought and paid for by local spammers.

  22. Whats next 'archie '? by nurb432 · · Score: 1

    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...

    --
    ---- Booth was a patriot ----