RE: [Firebird-devel] WNet and XNet

[Claudio V. C. <cv...@us...>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: fir...@li...
> [mailto:fir...@li...]On Behalf Of Jim
> Starkey
>
> Could somebody give me a quickie history lesson on WNet and XNet?

Whole history, no, since that secret book is kept by two dragons warding the
Borland castle. But at least an idea:
This comes from Borland age, AFAIR IB4 had WNet and SPX already (or was it
IPX?).
- W9X machines cannot be NetBIOS servers, only clients. But NT machines can
be servers. The WNet code has been working for years without much problems.
- We dropped support for Novell Netware.
- For true local connections between Windows classic and clients, Borland
had the local protocol based on IPClient/IPServer. It was a true pig, we
dropped it.
- Borland had the idea of XNET apparently for years, but never completed it.
A folk doing a port to WinCE supposedly completed it, but we didn't took the
code. The XNET completion belongs to Dmitry and whoever else that I may
forget. It's working as true local protocol in Windows.

>  Are
> they both still active?

Yes. Also, XNET is very young.

> Should Vulcan support both?  One?  Which?

Both, IMO, although today XNET seems to me more important than WNet as any
modern Windows that we support comes with TCP (unlike NT3.1 and friends)
that can supercede WNet. I think it's important to have the option of a true
local protocol.

C.