> -----Original Message-----
> Daniel Stenberg
> Sent: Monday, March 03, 2008 12:44 PM
>
> On Mon, 3 Mar 2008, Gabriel Kälin wrote:
>
> > I'd like to add a project idea:
> >
> > - ICAP
> >
> > The protocol is syntactically quite similar to HTTP, but
> uses a special
> > encoding/encapsulation of the request body, which consists
> of HTTP requests
> > and responses. There are several levels of how much there
> could be covered
> > by the project.
>
> Oh. Just out of curiousity, what kind of use-cases do you
> have/see for this
> protocol?

Client-side ICAP is mostly used in HTTP proxies to pass selected HTTP requests and responses through an anti-virus filter (Symantec, TrendMicro, Norton AntiVirus all provide ICAP interfaces), URL filters, anonymizers/translators or other filters. Anyway, that's what ICAP (Internet Content Adaptation Protocol) was designed for.

Unfortunately there are not many proxies that support ICAP, probably because there is no library such as libcurl that would make implementation easier. At least I'm not aware of any library. Even in the case of Apache I haven't knowledge of any module that would support ICAP.

Besides use for proxy implementations, I can also imagine that curl could directly be used to send files to a network attached anti-virus filter using ICAP. I don't know whether they provide other network based interfaces though.

Gabe
Received on 2008-03-03