freeWAIS Multiformat type and WWW front end
marca@eit.COM (Marc Andreessen)
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Date: Mon, 4 Apr 1994 11:28:18 --100
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From: marca@eit.COM (Marc Andreessen)
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Subject: freeWAIS Multiformat type and WWW front end
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David Crossley writes:
> We do not store our metadata in text files but in an RDBMS. So we
> do not have any text files to index. As far as I can see the only
> solution is to run a cron job every few days to generate metadata
> text files from the RDBMS for each dataset and index these.
>
> Another solution may be to create a text file for each dataset of
> likely keywords, index these and then somehow intercept the query
> with either a WAIS server script or a WWW server script. Does
> anyone know if this would be possible?
The latter should be possible if you're going through a sufficiently
smart and customized WAIS/WWW gateway. In other words, the gateway
has to be smart enough to map WAIS search hits to some representation
of files in the RDBMS; a parallel WWW script would then need to be
able to reach inside the database upon receiving a query for such a
representation. I think that's how it would work...
> I know that Mosaic for X-windows version 2.x clients support this
> multiformat type. Do any other clients?
> Do any WAIS clients support this multiformat type so that non-WWW access
> can be provided?
I know xwais does. I don't believe any other WWW clients do, but I
could easily be wrong. (Any WWW client that has direct WAIS support
and uses Mosaic's libwww2 should be able to handle it.)
> Enventually we will have to look at some user authentication aspects
> because some of these datasets will be restricted. Can someone please
> suggest some starting points to investigate this?
WWW currently provides "iffy" user authentication (passwords are sent
over the network uuencoded but not encrypted). See:
http://wintermute.ncsa.uiuc.edu:8080/auth-tutorial/tutorial.html
You can use this if you're always going through a WAIS/WWW gateway.
I'm not sure what the various versions of WAIS support along these
lines.
> This obviously has amazing potential. Anyone interested in this would
> do well to look at Marc Andreesen's 'Mosaic And WAIS Tutorial' at
> http://wintermute.ncsa.uiuc.edu:8080/wais-tutorial/wais.html
> Thanks for the tips Marc.
Glad they're useful!
Cheers,
Marc
--
Marc Andreessen
Enterprise Integration Technologies
Palo Alto, California
marca@eit.com, marca@netcom.com