in reply to A little project - Web storage

Personally, I haven't heard of any such projects or truly portable clients other than your webbrowser for those services.

I've looked at some of these services, namely iDrive and Freespace. Both of them use Javascript and cookies to present the files and store your login information, and iDrive uses the https protocol. All of these issues should be taken care of by the LWP module. Writing the actual code to parse out the directory contents and manipulate them will be tough work, as you will have to design an uniform interface to these services.

I'm sorry to desillusion you, but the only "true" hacking taking place would be in staring at some Javascript embedded in some HTML to extract the filenames and file URLs from there :)

  • Comment on (Some pointers for Web access) RE: A little project - Web storage

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
RE: (Some pointers for Web access) RE: A little project - Web storage
by Intrepid (Curate) on Aug 11, 2000 at 01:15 UTC
     by Corion:

    Personally, I haven't heard of any such projects or truly
    portable clients other than your webbrowser for those services.
    I've looked at some of these services, namely iDrive
    and Freespace. Both of them use Javascript and cookies to
    present the files and store your login information, and 
    iDrive uses the https protocol. All of these issues should be taken care of
    by the LWP module. Writing the actual code to parse
    out the directory contents and manipulate them will be
    tough work, as you will have to design an uniform interface
    to these services.

    I'm sorry to desillusion you, but the only "true" hacking
    taking place would be in staring at some Javascript embedded
    in some HTML to extract the filenames and file URLs from there :)

    Thanks for your reply, Corion.

    While it is true that the main way to interact with those services is through the Web browser (rather narrow range of recent ones that those services "support"), in fact several of them (<CITE>xdrive</CITE>, <CITE>freediskspace</CITE>) have downloadable applications that, once installed to the user's Windoze system, allow the remote storage area to appear as a "virtual hard drive" mapped to a drive letter for 'doze. This takes place purely outside of one's browser, in fact the browser does not even have to be running.

    LWP would be the way to go for sure if one was going to try to simulate the client-server interaction that takes place when one is doing the ordinary Web-based transfers. However the alternate method that these downloadable apps suggest is possible, could also be implemented in Perl, and would possibly be lower-level hacking than using LWP.

    soren

      Actually, I have my doubts that someone who already has a working interface (http), would go out and create yet another interface for the sake of better access. My guess is that those downloadable applications and explorer shell extensions are http clients as well, although they might access special pages, not unlike the special pages here at Perlmonks for the Chatterbox clients. But I really doubt that it would be of any benefit to go away from the http protocol (OK, maybe to ftp), either speed/performance wise or development wise.

      But even though you make derogatory remarks about Windows, you seem still to use it ("for the games" I hear them say), so you will have most likely ZoneGate installed, a firewall, that can also tell you quite a lot about incoming and outgoing TCP/IP connections. I suggest you take a short look with that one running and then maybe have a peek with a network sniffer - and be prepared to find http inside. :)