🚀 go-pugleaf

On Mon, 2 Jul 2001 20:46:55 -0600, "Randy K. Secrist"
<r.secrist@m.cc.utah.edu> wrote:

>This is a great newsgroup question - since it deals with connecting to
>newsgroups....
>
>I am writing a nntp client using java, and have a few options.  I could use
>the java.net.Socket class to socket the connection and handle all
>input/output one byte at a time, but I don't want to reinvent the wheel.  I
>noticed a javax.mail.internet.NewsGroup class, however it is basically just
>a container for a newsgroup - nothing that deals with establishing the
>connection.
>
>So - I was thinking - JNDI - connecting using the same method which I have
>used to connect to LDAP - bind to a context, yada yada yada - but I haven't
>ever done this with anything BUT Ldap, and can't find any good documentation
>on using JNDI with nntp.
>
>Does anyone have any other ideas - suggestions?  Or, should I dig in, socket
>the connection and reinvent the wheel?  I already did this for SMTP - then
>found out about javamail later... :)  Being a student, I am young and am use
>to creating wheels from squares - but must I do it the hard way everytime?
>
Depends entirely on what you want to get out of this.  Just because
somebody else has written a class, it doesn't mean you're "reinventing
the wheel".  A wheel is a fundamental bit of technology that is
interchangable in most contexts.  Very little end-user software fits
that description.

You can hunt around the internet for somebody's NNTP class and hope it
does what you need.  If it has bugs, or if it doesn't handle certain
message types, or whatever, it's your problem.  If you don't know
conceptually what's going on under the covers, good luck fixing it.

In my own opinion, something as (relatively) simple as an NNTP reader
is worth doing yourself.  It is fully documented in RFC 977, which you
can get from http://www.freesoft.org/CIE/RFC/977/index.htm, among
other places.  Without reading the protocol spec, you don't know what
features are there or how they interrelate.

Programming with sockets does not mean working at the byte level.
That's not how text protocols like NNTP, POP, and SMTP work.  You can
use telnet to manually interact with a server in full lines of ASCII
text terminated with CRLF.  A software client is just one simple step
above that.  After you have opened a socket to the server, you can get
its input and output streams and wrap them in BufferedReader and
PrintWriter, respectively, to allow you to use readLine() and
println() for your interaction.
--
Phil Hanna
Author of JSP: The Complete Reference
http://www.philhanna.com