Transmission is fundamentally a Bit Torrent client and communicates with other Bit Torrent peers. In addition to this Transmission supports network-based remote control, whereby an authorised user may control the Transmission core from another machine via the Transmission JSON RPC protocol. To make remote control easier from an arbitrary machine, Transmission Core can also serve a javascript web application to any browser and which in turn makes JSON RPC calls back to the Transmission core.
The Core components and methods of control are shown below:
From the above diagram it can be seen that a Transmission Core may be controlled by the following:
- Local directly linked GUI (OS X, GTK+)
- Local or Remote Qt GUI
- Local or Remote Command Line Utility
- Local or Remote Transmission Web Application running in a web browser
The multiple methods of controlling Transmission and the various native GUIs available result in several different Transmission products as shown in the figure below:
The products are:
- Transmission Desktop - OS X
- Transmission Desktop - Linux/GTK+
- Transmission Desktop - Un*x/Qt
- Transmission Daemon (headless)
- Transmission Command Line
The Transmission packages available on various distributions may include one or more of these components. Note. Although the diagram shows "Transmission Desktop Qt" as being Qt GUI + Transmission Core, the Qt component may be packaged on its own as a purely remote tool.