On Thu, 22 Jan 2009, Gisle Vanem wrote:

> I suggested (some years ago) to add user-defined (unknown) URL-schemes in
> _curlrc. AFAICS curl could be the front-end (to the network part of the
> protocol) and the actual ODBC thingy be done in an extension DLL (or an
> Active-X). But then curl would no longer be cross-platform.
>
> Come to think of it, I now want curl to handle MMS (MP3 downloads) and
> Podcast. There's no set standard URL-schemes for these either.

If libcurl would get any such plugin architecture it would of course simply
use the plugins that are available when run and thus different systems and
different operating systems would get installed with a different set. Then
there could even be different code bases for different operating systems if
that is the clever choice.

These days we have a fairly good internal "API" for the protocols so it would
probably be easier to reach there now than it was a few years ago. I'm not
saying it is complete or would suffice at this point, only that the foundation
is already there.

I would assume a plugin-based system would simply use dlopen()/LoadLibrary()
at global_init() time or similar, and then libcurl internals would use the
externally provided protocols exactly as it would use "internal" protocols.

Perhaps ODBC would even be a good protocol to start something like this
with...

-- 
  / daniel.haxx.se