FYI: Netscape roaming - PUT, MOVE, DELETE

(I did a quick scan for "PUT", "roaming" in the archive & didn't see
anything. Apologies if duplicate..)

FYI, Netscape 4.5 implements a roaming scheme using either HTTP or LDAP
servers to store personal information. The HTTP scheme uses PUT commands,
as does Netscape Gold publisher, to store personal information on the
server. In order to avoid possible update conflicts, Netscape use an HTTP
action MOVE which does not appear in RFC 2068, in conjunction with the
DELETE command.

A typical sequence is as follows:

PUT .../userid/WRITETEST
DELETE .../userid/WRITETEST
HEAD .../userid/liprefs
GET .../userid/liprefs
etc. (cookies, addessbooks, etc.)
<browse session>
HEAD .../userid/liprefs
PUT .../userid/tempfile
MOVE .../userid/tempfile .../userid/liprefs (destination sent as HTTP
 header "New-URI:")
etc.

Nicholas Petreley has written a nice article on the subject, at
http://www.linuxworld.com/linuxworld/lw-1999-06/lw-06-penguin_3.html,
which I found after writing my own roaming server, where he mentions that
the use of MOVE/DELETE may be controlled by setting the preferences value
user_pref("li.prefs.http.useSimplePut", true); in order to avoid problems
with Squid and other proxies.

Netscape's page on roaming is at
http://help.netscape.com/products/client/communicator/manual_roaming2.html

Andrew Daviel
TRIUMF, Vancouver Webpages etc.
Received on Mon Jun 21 1999 - 11:30:27 MDT