[jsword-devel] HTTP module installer

[DM Smith]

In SwordInstaller there are two ways that ftp is invoked:
1) Download a single file.
2) Download everything, recursively.

The second action uses directory listing.

However these are private/protected, so their use is limited. When looking at the code to determine the limits, it becomes clear 
that option #2 is called not with a directory name but with a file. So it is equivalent to option 1.

The Installer interface does not expose a multiple item download.

So in practice the way it works is that the mods.d.tar.gz is downloaded and each conf is unpacked, read and built into BookMetaData. 
These are listed to the user, who may pick them for download. From the BookMetaData an installer request for each book is created. 
The book is a directory containing various files and these are gotten by downloading the directory recursively. But the directory, 
does not contain sub-directories.

At another place in the code, these downloaded files are accessed by knowing their name from the BookMetaData. It does not look on 
disk to determine the file name.

See below where this can be handy.

Mark Goodwin wrote:

> I spent a couple of hours last night looking at the possibility of
> making an HTTP installer.
> 
> I plan to put together an initial version that looks at the mods.d.gz
> file at http://www.crosswire.org/ftpmirror/pub/sword/raw/mods.d.tar.gz
> (as the FTP installer does at  the moment), then gets a file listing
> page from http://www.crosswire.org/ftpmirror/pub/sword/packages/rawzip/
> before parsing out filenames, matching them to module names (where
> possible) and downloading the module ZIPs.
> 
> This will work, and should be more reliable than FTP (at least until
> someone disables directory listings on the webserver), but offends my
> sense of elegance.  In the long term, I think it would be good to have
> some kind of module server (I think we've discussed this on list
> before). Can anyone think of a better short-term option?

There is a module server:
http://crosswire.org/sword/servlet/SwordMod.Verify?modName=MAK&pkgType=raw
This will return a zip file, that can be uncompressed to the expected location.

And will remove the necessity of a directory listing.

Using POST rather than GET may also be an option as most servlets allow both.

> 
> MarkG
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