Final Thoughts
A program like Internet Updater can be a powerful tool. Because I wanted to keep this program general, I used the OpenURL method rather than the Execute method. The Execute method would have required me to determine the protocol being used, and issuing different commands based on the protocol would have been a lot more work. I originally designed this program just to retrieve the list of remote files from a web server and to use FTP to retrieve the files themselves. However, I felt that everyone might not have access to both an FTP server and a web server in real life, hence the changes that leave the final decisions up to you.
You can also use the Internet Transfer control for many other things than updating your application. It is a good solution for uploading information to a mainframe for batch processing. (I know this is old-fashioned, but many places still use batch processing on mainframes for a lot of their work.) It also can be useful if you want to download web pages and perform an analysis on their data. This could be information such as stock quotes, price information, or top-ten lists. You could even program it to download the latest Dilbert cartoon each morning so it is ready for your viewing when you arrive at work.
I should also point out that the Internet Transfer control also supports the HTTPS secure protocol for transferring files. This may be important if you need to transport secure information. Also the “reserved” protocol (Protocol = 3) that’s in the documentation actually refers to the Gopher protocol. Gopher was a short-lived solution to making the Internet easier to surf. It began to get popular about a year before the World Wide Web sprang up. It made it easy to traverse a tree structure of files on different servers. It was a big improvement on using anonymous FTP to surf for information, but it lacked the web’s graphical appeal. Its use declined after the World Wide Web began its phenomenal rise in popularity. While there may be a few Gopher servers still in existence, most of the Gopher servers I was involved with were converted to web servers a long time ago.