Gopher University 93

[Jim Beach]

Here is a nutshell summary of the 1993 Gopher conference held yesterday at
the University of Minnesota.


>From December 91 to December 92, Gopher went from 199th to 14th rank
relative to all our applications which use the Internet backbone in terms of
number of packets communicated.

The Gopher protocol (not Gopher+) is now an informational RFC (#1436) and it
is headed down the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force - I think)
standards path.

Gopher+ is still in beta, but coming on quickly - an upwardly compatible
superset of the Gopher protocol.  Main features: attributes (metadata) for
Gopher menu items, alternate document and directory views, support for
interactive forms called "ASK blocks," and user authentication "AdmitOne."

Unix server, client and Mac clients are all beta. Word on the street is:
wait until they are stable.

PC Gopher III client is available, major new features: multiple threads,
binary file transfer support, swaps out to fire up "helper" applications
like image viewers.  In the future: new memory management scheme, Gopher+,
display files > 64K, support within gopher for vt100 and tn3270.

TurboGopher (Mac client): fast new version, working on ISO Latin and Chinese
and Japanese support.  Helper applications now available and configurable
through 'Options' menu.

Microsoft Windows Clients are now being developed at two undisclosed sites.

Team Gopher is working to perfect the Gopher-to-FTP gateway, lots of
problems with non-standard FTP server implementations, especially the
FTPD.NLM for Novell.

Unix server and client: more work on Gopher+ features ongoing.  ASK blocks
now available in beta version, AdmitOne in beta, better caching.  In the
future: capability to specify preferred document versions in client, online
configuration of helper apps (as in the Mac client), an integrated pager
notification system to beep you at midnight when Gopherd goes south, more
and better logging including tracking popularity of items, more development
of a generic relational database interface (probably SQL), they are
experimenting with Oracle.

Further work is being done to improve Veronica searching. There are now two
Veronica servers in the US to balance the load, with more coming.  About 10
million total Gopher items worldwide, when redundant links are eliminated
about 1.5 million items exist.  Plans are underfoot to take good advantage
of Gopher+ item attributes - to be able to use those to narrow Veronica
searches.  Jughead is a limited version of Veronica for creating local
Gopher Item (searchable) databases.

OS/2 Gopher client now available from: index.almaden.ibm.com

There were several interesting presentations of Gopher installations around
the US.  Some of the most interesting were: U of Minn's - the root Mother of
all Gophers gets 50,000 transactions per day - it is a Mac IIci.  University
of Notre Dame has a massive Gopher implementation in a single campus-wide
Andrew File System.  Users can mail, FTP and simply copy files into Gopher
directories -- virtually all of the Gopher administration is completely
automated with PERL scripts.  Prentice Riddle's (Rice Univ) Gopher calendar
and gopher-mail gateway was demonstrated and superb.


Jim Beach

_________________________________________________________________________

James H. Beach                                      beach at huh.harvard.edu
Data Administrator                                  Tel:   (617) 495-1912
MCZ, Herbaria, Arnold Arboretum                     Fax:   (617) 495-9484
22 Divinity Avenue
Harvard University                                  ICBM:  42 22' 40.0" N
Cambridge, MA 02138, USA                                   71 06' 58.8" W