# Re: Client-side expanded url's

Mic Bowman (mic@transarc.com)
Fri, 08 Mar 1996 08:18:10 -0500

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    Message-Id: <9603081318.AA05750@mocha.bunyip.com>

    To: uri@bunyip.com

    Subject: Re: Client-side expanded url's

    In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 07 Mar 1996 08:04:37 EST."

                 <199603071304.IAA14740@zeppo.East.Sun.COM>

    Date: Fri, 08 Mar 1996 08:18:10 -0500

    From: Mic Bowman <mic@transarc.com>

A couple years ago, Transarc built a URL translation facility to
define equivalent URLs with a preferred order for access. Our motivation
was to make use of the caching/replication facilities of a wide-area
file system like AFS/DFS. Given the choice of pulling a page from an
http server or the equivalent page from an afs server, I generally
prefer the afs server.

The translation worked through a series of rules not unlike the rules
that some servers have for translating incoming HTTP paths into local
file system paths. The rules file looks something like this:

pattern:
substitution1 [frequency]
substitution2 [frequency]
...

If the URL matches the pattern, then choose a substitution. The
substitution is chosen randomly with a distribution based on the
frequency parameter.

In addition to enabling dual access to files available through both
afs and http, the translation provides a nice way to access transparently
proxy servers, ftp mirror archives, and replicated http sites.

For more information you might want to check out:

http://www.transarc.com/Department/Research/projects/SynFS/translate.html

--Mic

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