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From: brianb@kinetics.com (Brian Bulkowski)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Communications Toolbox questions
Message-ID: <898@excelan.COM>
Date: 18 Dec 89 22:10:46 GMT
References: <9125@hoptoad.uucp> <36869@apple.Apple.COM> <9188@hoptoad.uucp> <37028@apple.Apple.COM> <9223@hoptoad.uucp> <37200@apple.Apple.COM> <9325@hoptoad.uucp>
Sender: news@excelan.COM
Reply-To: brianb@plasma.kinetics.com (Brian Bulkowski)
Organization: Novell Corp., Walnut Creek, CA.
Lines: 40

Hi,
About the CommTB and Telnet and FTP:

FTP is actually even harder to impliment under the CommTB than I care to
think about. One would think that you could create a special connection
tool that uses 2 channels, one for the data connection, one for the
control connection. Have the application do some translations between the
user interface and pipe the commands over the control connection, then
receive and send data over the data connection. Well, WRONG. And the
problem hasn't anything to do with matching patterns, but instead creating
the data connection. The data connection must be created on the fly, once
per file, and the connection tool has to know what port to create it on.
So unless the tool is happily parsing the control stream, it won't know
1) when to open the control stream, or 2) what port to open it on.

Anyone see any REASONABLE ways around this?

Telnet is actually less of a hassle than it sounds. I have implimented
a simple one, and it works fine. I haven't got the finer points coded,
like async calls, but it works OK nonetheless. The way to do stuff like
echo negotiation is this: it only gets done once, when the connection is
established, and the value must be set in the config dialog box. This means
that 1) the user has to configure 2 things (the terminal and the connection),
and 2) if he screws up, things will be bad. There are other negotations that
are impossible, like window size negotations. As far as I can see, no
professional application would use the CommTB, at least in the TCP world,
because it's too simple and the state of the art (InterCon's Connect II,
Novell/Kinetics' HostAccess, etc. etc.) has
gone far beyond what the CommTB will offer without significant design
changes.

On a different note, anyone got some sample code that a tool can use
to do pop up menus with the CommTB? Why isn't it in the manual how
a tool creates and deals with pop up menus (arg, arg, bad doc)? There's
some helpful stuff in the new code somewhere, but sometimes I can be
dense.

Thanks,
Brian Bulkowski
Software Type