ANN: FTP 0.1

[Riccardo]

F T P   0 . 1
=============

WHAT IS IT?
FTP is a file transfer application (RFC 765) featuring a compact and 
easy interface. As most applications in GAP it tries to work on both 
GNUstep and MacOS X and retain the utmost possible simlilarity among the 
two version to ease working in both environments.

FTP supports different port arbitration modes: "default", standard 
"PORT" (also known as active) and standard "PASV" (also known as 
passive).


FTP also tries to encapsulate the FTP networking into a single class 
that could be reused in other applications. I encourage this!
The same encapsulation is done for the local file viewer and the common 
operation are collected and exposed in a common superclass.

FTP is at version 0.1 and has thus quite some limitations, but I have 
tested the socket code with big and small files.
Limitations in the ftp engine itself are of different nature: apart form 
not recognizing some error messages (yet) it doesn't recognize links. 
This can become a nasty limitations but I currently don't have a known 
solution. Although I could parse out the file name easily, I still don't 
know how to get the file/directory type information reliably.

The client itself uses the ftp engine itself in single-threaded and 
blocking mode, thus it is not responsive during a file transfer 
operation. Interestingly, this is more noticeable on GNUstep where it 
also means spotty window updates.



WHERE:
FTP is part of GAP, the GNUSTEP Application Project 
(http://www.nongnu.org/gap/). Specifically its pages are:
http://gap.nongnu.org/ftp/index.html
http://savannah.nongnu.org/download/gap/FTP-0.1.tar.gz for a direct 
download.

- Riccardo