The problem: there are a number of categories, broader than file transfer in the sense of FTP, which involve some kind of non-interactive content transfer. I believe we need an "overarching" article to describe the varied issues and then to link to the specific protocols, and perhaps some intermediate articles about issues shared among subgroups of technologies. I had started to do this with an article about "file transfer" to precede "FTP", to provide some of the problems where FTP has limitations (e.g., firewall-friendliness, NAT incompatibility, lack of standard approach to encrypted transfer,lack of standard checkpoint/restart).
"Information transfer" seems too general, as I am not focused on things like viewing web pages -- although there are subcategories of enhancements to web servers.
Still staying with idea of transfers of ordered sets of records, paradigms other than FTP's came to mind:
- NFS, optimized for LANs and with very different connection management and error handling, also lacking security
- distributed file sharing (P2P methods with Torrent as the most likely example).
- Security fixes/enhancements to FTP (e.g., SFTP, firewall-friendly FTP with the passive OPEN)
It then occurred to me that there are tools for transferring things that aren't files, but messages/records that get transferred: the classic way goes by many names, such as Netnews, USENET, and NNTP. I mention this because news is intelligent in the sense as are P2P methods that decide what part of content should be serviced from where, which, in turn, makes me think SMTP is close to belonging here, but does it have enough intelligence?
As I've mentioned, this category should avoid direct interaction such as HTTP, but things that extend/support servers, such as
- content distribution networks (e.g., Akamai)
- web caches (e.g., Squid)
- protocols to support caches (e.g., WCCP, ICP)
are fair things to cover.
Can we discuss, probably on the forum, how to organize a set of articles and the scope of their coverage?
Howard
