Absolutely. If it were just a matter of implementing a remote copy
via FTP agent, we'd just use a proxy FTP mechanism as someone already
suggested. This application is the first phase of a document access
system which would be entirely Web browser based, from the client side.
For various reasons, we don't want the documents to be directly available
on the server -- we want to transfer them to a client-accessible filesystem
after some authentication and accounting is done. We also want this to
be expanded into a general information server gateway: WAIS, gopher, etc.
This is why it's so important for us to make sure that we're keeping
the general spirit of the Web intact as we do this, instead of just
pasting a bunch of crap in that isn't conceptually integrated with it.
It *seems* to be conceptually related, but then I've only been working
with this stuff for about a month or so, and there's a substantial
amount of material to master... ;)
Richard