SUMMARY: WWW Gateway for reading news.

From: Jorge Martin (jorge@sarenet.es)
Date: Mon Mar 27 1995 - 02:11:08 CST


('binary' encoding is not supported, stored as-is) Here is my summary:

I+ve found the following software, all in perl, and these are my considerations:

http://ls6-www.informatik.uni-dortmund.de/htbin/news
( use http://ls6-www.informatik.uni-dortmund.de/cgi-bin/news to download it).
( Thanks to Ulrich Pfeifer, <pfeifer@ls6-www.informatik.uni-dortmund.de>).

It+s just one script (cgi-script) to do it all (except posting), so it+s
very easy to install. There is two problems; to use perl 5 you need to add
a "require +sys/socket.ph+" as the first line after the comments, and
should be installed in a different machine from the News server. I like it
because is the simplest and powerful, though it+s is posible to improve the
function that gets a list of articles from a newsgroup ( getting articles
with references that have expired runs out the whole timeout so could be
quite slow for newsgroups with many kind of this articles ). Also could be
improve to allow posting. But it+s OK.

http://forum.swarthmore.edu/forum.news.gateway.html
( Thanks to Jay Scott <jay@forum.swarthmore.edu> )

It seems to be the powerful. You can test it by creating an account at
their www page. Allows posting. It+s really a group of perl scripts that
make a www daemon, that serves news as html pages. It+s a beta software and
I couldn+t run it as it doen+t support perl 5. It simulate very well the
kind of interface that Netscape provides, with some considerations about
security and the posibility to have more than one news server. You should
try it.

http://akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo/Computers/World_Wide_Web/Communication
( Thanks to Daniel LaLiberte, <liberte@ncsa.uiuc.edu> )

You will find something called Hypernews. It runs perl5, but works without
any problem. It allows reading and posting, but it has to map phisically
every new to a html file so it has no very economy considerations. Could be
a good solutions to those who want to create a kind of news local service,
without installing the whole news server. I think that should be improve to
make all the translation between news and html files at running time.

http://www.york.ac.uk/ServerSupport/UsenetNews/
( Thanks to Mike Brudenell, <pmb1@unix.york.ac.uk> )

Here you can find Hyperactive 1.0.3. It+s a perl script that executed at
your news server, creates the html files needed to complete the Netscape
interface. It+s a very good solution for those who want to use Netscape
news client, with some initial pages that help the process of newsgroups
selection. ( Netscape reads all the newsgroups file every time you ask for
a group of newsgroups, at least in version 1.0 ).

I want to thank also to all those who reference me to the right sites:

Kai Grossjohann, <grossjoh@ls6.informatik.uni-dortmund.de>
Neal, <nrd@lenti.med.umn.edu>
Bill Edmunds, <W.Edmunds@exeter.ac.uk>
Yves Morin, <Yves_Morin@BComeau.Hydro.Qc.CA>

My original question was:

>Hi !
>
>Is there any cgi-scripts that could be used as a W3 gateway to read news
>from an INN news server ?
>
>I know that software like Netscape includes a news client that could be
>used this way, but I am thinking of people that hasn+t this chance like
>lynx users.
>
>Thanks in advance.
>

__________________________________________________________________________

Jorge Martin Diaz de Cerio Tel: +34 4 420 9466
SAREnet Fax: +34 4 420 9465
Parque Tecnologico, 103 E-mail: jorge@sarenet.es
E48016-Zamudio, Spain.
__________________________________________________________________________



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