Remote data access
one way to address issue 154 (and lots of other usages) would be to always use libcurl for file access in plugins. Therefore, any plugin would have the capability to retrieve remote files by any of the CURL supported protocols. A few options would have to be added to the io.ini for CURL.
see http://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/
(the examples showing how it works are very easy)