[Webfunds-users] Questions

Mon Mar 27 01:23:24 2000

Craig Haynie wrote:
> 
> A couple of questions!
> 
> 1) Will we get access to the communication protocol that WebFunds Wallet
> uses to communicate with the issuer at DigiGold, so that a shopping cart
> interface can be developed?

The source is in the download, in src.zip.  It is nominally under
a Mozilla-style licence, which I have written, but never got around
to formalising and publishing.  Hassle me if it is an issue.

(Did you notice problems on the issuer tonight?  Receipts were
giving trouble and failing to recover.  Fixed now.)

> If not, how can one go about implementing a
> shopping cart interface?

SCI is a fairly technical piece of work.  The main problem is not
to do with WebFunds, but how you get control of the browser such
that it can make a payment and send it to the right place.  Unfortunately
the options for browser integration are all sucky, so a lot depends
on the wheres and whens as to how it pans out.  I've been involved
in plugins, proxies, and agents, and they all suck in a production
environment.

How to do it *this* time I'm not sure.  There are other ways, like
applets, or web sites, or open ports.  Beyond scope of current post,
but we can push it over to another thread if desired...

> 2) How can I back up my data? Do I need to back up the entire WebFunds
> Wallet directory? If I backup the WebFunds Wallet directory, will this be
> sufficient?

I would back up the entire directory for convenience, because I would
want to avoid any trouble with later generations of software.  However,
you could back up the just the following:

     *  the "user" directory, or
     *  just the user/data2, or
     *  just the user/data2/WalletManager/SOX, or
     *  just the user/data2/WalletManager/SOX/Accounts directory...

depending on how willing you are to reverse engineer all the above.

Now, you're probably asking why we haven't done something better than
the above.  The answer is simple - it is hard to do something that
solves the real problems.

We do have an answer.  It is network backups.  Using ... SOX.  But,
that takes a bit of work, we need someone to write the backend part,
add some protocol elements, and hack it into WebFunds.  Once that is
done, there will be real good backup protection, but as I say, we
need to do that...

iang