[Asterisk-Users] Survey: Grandstream improvements.........

[Michael T Farnworth]

On Wed, 22 Oct 2003,  John Brown (CV) wrote:

> http == hyper text transport protocol
> 
> tftp == trivial FILE trasfer protocol

Based on this definition we could suggest that the web should only consist 
of a few html files as a jpeg clearly isn't hypertext.

I suspect the reason HTTP was proposed is that almost everybody who runs a
network will know about it, and we must also remember that almost every
Unix OS is likely to come with a pre-installed and configured webserver,
on the other hand tftp is almost always going to be disabled and need
configuring.

HTTP is trivial to implement on the client side, you simply send a line
like:

GET /someconfig.txt HTTP/1.0

You then read the input until you get to a blank line, then the file
follows that.  It isn't hard to write a simple http daemon if people are
looking for a small footprint, in fact I am sure such things do exist.  
You could even write a http daemon using tcp_wrappers and a few lines of
shell script if hard pressed.

I suspect tftp probably has a simple protocol too.  Maybe support could be
added for http as well as tftp.

Michael