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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."

12 of 51 comments (clear)

  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
  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.
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    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.

  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 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.
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      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
    2. 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. 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.

  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.

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    Sam Kennedy

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    samrolken
  7. 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?

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    huzzah