On 22 Apr 2009, at 10:42, Joe Greco wrote:
While HTTP remains popular as a way to interact with humans,
especially if
you want to try to do redirects, acknowledge license agreements,
etc., FTP
is the file transfer protocol of choice for basic file transfer, and
can
be trivially automated, optimized, and is overall a good choice for
file
transfer.
Does anyone know what "FTP" stands for, anyways? I've always
wondered...
:-)
I was mainly poking at the fact that Bill seemed to be comparing SSL-
wrapped file transfer with non-SSL-wrapped file transfer, but I'm
intrigued by the idea that FTP without SSL might be faster than HTTP
without SSL, since in my mind outside the minimal amount of signalling
involved they both amount to little more than a single TCP stream.
Bill sent me a link to a paper. I will read it.
However, I take some small issue with the assertion that FTP is easier
to script than HTTP. The only way I have ever found it easy to script
FTP (outside of writing dedicated expect scripts to drive clients,
which really seems like cheating) is to use tools like curl, and I
don't see why HTTP is more difficult than FTP as a protocol in that
case. Perhaps I'm missing something.
Joe
