After you've gotten online, RexxINet is all ready for you to call its other functions.

What do you do next? First, you need to pick out some server somewhere to which you plan to send your requests for files and/or web pages, or to which you plan to send some files and/or web pages. For example, maybe you plan to connect to Microsoft's Developer Network site (ie, msdn.microsoft.com) and download the web page msdnmag (whose URL would be http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag). Or maybe you plan to connect to some FTP site to download files from an FTP directory.

So you pick out a server, and a protocol, and tell RexxINet about it. Depending upon what protocol you use plan to use, you will call different functions in RexxINet. There are RexxINet functions that send/receive data with the Http protocol, functions that send/receive data with Ftp protocol, and functions that send/receive data with the Gopher protocol. So depending upon which protocol you're going to use, you'll use the appropriate set of functions. For example, for Ftp protocol, RexxINet has functions to create and delete directories on a remote computer. There are no such equivalent functions for Http protocol (since Http doesn't support that).

So at this point, you can select a protocol below to get further details on its use. We'll just deal with Http and Ftp here, and forget about Gopher, since virtually all servers support the former two, and you can use them for just about everything you need to do.