> From: Bill Haskett > Just to let people know, mvNET offer telnet as one of > the connection methods (I use uodotnet) but it's fine > for external developers for our ..NET application. > Also, if I'm not mistaken, Fusionware uses telnet as > their underlying connection method.
(mv.NET also supports SSH) I think some people misunderstand what Telnet is. It's two things in one. Traditionally we recognize Telnet as the mechanism that displays characters on a X-by-Y screen. Telnet clients interpret specific escape sequences as screen positioning and other @(-x) features that we all know (hehe and love). The protocol is disparaged for what we see. Underneath, Telnet is a socket protcol which manages the transport of data. The above description describes the kind of data that's transported, but that same data could be transported over any protocol, even SMTP/email if you don't mind it taking a few minutes for your screen to refresh, or Usenet/NNTP if you don't mind waiting hours or days. All socket protocols wrap data in a sequence of characters, with headers describing the data and a body containing the payload itself. UniObjects uses a proprietary, undocumented protocol - for all we know it could be binary-encoded Telnet! It's ALL characters, and the ALL work pretty much the same way. Some protocols are better suited to some tasks than others. While I personally believe Telnet can be used as a reasonably fast data transport, some would argue that a 1500 character payload limit makes the protocol too chatty, feature handshaking makes the protocol too bulky, and other factors might add to making it inadequate as a modern transport. But when people are arguing against Telnet, I guarantee you they're not looking at the RFC (spec document) and talking about protocol nuances. I wish we could elevate the discussion to that level and away from gut-level "telnet sux" rhetoric. You can put any client, character or GUI, on any protocol. We don't disparage SMTP because of the Pine text client, because most people use a graphical e-mail client. (Completely OT but I really hate the SMTP protocol and yet we've been irrevocably bound to it for almost 30 years.) We con't disparage FTP for the text interfaces, I'd guess usage of text vs GUI FTP clients is about 50/50 as we rely on text-based FTP for many of our background transfer tasks. So we shouldn't dismiss Telnet as a transport protocol based on its completely unrelated and traditional use with terminal emulation clients. Other arguments may carry weight, not that one. T _______________________________________________ U2-Users mailing list U2-Users@listserver.u2ug.org http://listserver.u2ug.org/mailman/listinfo/u2-users
