Silver Platter

Silver Platter is now freeware. Download here

Future Enhancements

These are some possibilities I am considering in a future release. Some are more realistic than others and none are guaranteed.

• Support for PUT command. This would allow uploading of files. This would most likely require a javascript page using XmlHttpRequest functionality to upload the file. IE and FireFox/Mozilla reportedly support this, but I haven't found a definitive answer about IE Mac or Safari.
• Support for AppleSingle files. Forked files would (optionally) be sent as AppleSingle files, which preserves the filetype information as well as both the data and resource fork.
• Converting formatted text files (AppleWorks, Teach, etc) into HTML on the fly. This would, of course, retain as much formatting information as possible.
• Saving log files into the common log file format (used by most web servers).
• Option to have SP automatically start itself and run without the window being open
• Better control over how much processor time SP can use.
• Display the proper IIgs icon in the directory listings by converting the IIgs icon to a windows bitmap file.
• Support for more HTTP headers (if last modified, et cetera).
• Option to disable Twilight II while active.

In The Beginning…

I wanted some IIgs version control software. Of course, there isn't any. Rather than write some myself, I decided it would be best to use CVS, RCS, P4 or whatever on my BSD box. Of course, that would only work if there was a quick and convenient way to automatically transfer files over. Of course, there wasn't.

TFTP seemed to be the simplest transfer method, so I started writing a TFTP client. However, early testing wasn't as promising and I got distracted with other things. Later on, I did get a Finger client working. finger :src:fingerd:fingerd.c@10.0.0.1 for example, would open the file specified and send it back to the requester. Crude and limited, yes, but it could also be automated.

After that, I wrote a Quote Of The Day NDA server. It was silly, but it did demonstrate that a TCP server could be written as an NDA and run in the background with minimal impact.

Next, I started writing an NDA ftp client. This soon devolved into user interface land as I decided a menu bar would be more or less necessary. IIgs technote #3 discussed this to a degree, however the sample code provided is horribly buggy and completely wrong on many accounts. I looked at EgoEd and Hermes to see how they handled it (EgoEd since I had the source, Hermes because it was written in nice compact 65816 assembly so it was easy to read the disassembly). After only a bit of poking I got it working correctly. However, the rest of the project was put on hold.

A couple weeks later, a random comment inspired me to look into the possibility of an HTTP server. I was more or less familiar with the HTTP protocol (from telnetting to port 80) and realized it would be quite similar to the finger daemon I had previously written. I ripped the guts from the Quote of the Day NDA and the interface from the FTP NDA and soon had something working.

Initially, I was only interested in doing virtual directory listings, but I added support for index.html files and soon it was a full blown HTTP server.