Article Preview
Buy Now
| Print: | |
| PDF: |
Review
FTPKit
Issue: 4.5 (May/June 2006)
Author: Norman Palardy
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 3,107
Starting Page Number: 8
RBD Number: 4502
Resource File(s): None
Related Link(s): None
Known Limitations: None
Full text of article...
I'm not an FTP expert. At least not as far as implementing the protocol goes. I just use it, and it's more secure cousin SFTP. So a set of classes that are easy to use and enable me to use FTP from my own software is a great thing. FTPKit does this.
I downloaded the software, and within 5 minutes, had a quick FTP browser up and running that I could use to browse my own FTP site. Pretty darned handy. And I hadn't had to read all the documentation to get this far.
Additional reading revealed a lot of nice features for making FTP easy to deal with. The event driven nature of the FTPSocket makes it an easy to use control whether you decide to put one on a Window, or subclass it for yourself to handle the events.
The example that comes with the software serves as a nice working example of how to use the FTPKit and serves as a part of the overall documentation.
About the only real downside ran into is that the kit only implements FTP and not the more secure version called SFTP. But, since SFTP IS, in and of itself a "new" protocol and not just FTP running over SSH I can understand why it is not
part of the FTPKit. It would be a great addition though.
That said, it was very easy to use, well documented and very straight forward to get an FTP session up and running. The only issue I ran into whs that it would give me the wrong fle name for files on my FTP server becuase of how it formats the results of asking for a listing. As soon as I saw this I wrote the support account with this problem and the reply confirmed my suspicion that my FTP server replies with oddly formatted lines. However, FTPKit is set up in a way that I could handle the special parsing of any returned data that is not as FTPKit expects.
The documentation is clear and concise. Coupled with the example it serves as a good reference for using the FTPKit.
There are other FTP solutions available for the RB market. I haven't compared FTPKit to the others, although a deeper review of the various solutions might be warranted in a longer artcle.
All in all, except for the issue I ran into, which I have seen with commercial FTP clients, FTPKit is a simple and easy to use way to get FTP into your programs if you need it.
IN BRIEF Product FTPKit Manufacturer Bains Software Price $30 (Hobbyist) $75 (Professional) Contact Info http://www.bainsware.com/ Pros Good documentation Simple to incorporate
Cons Does not support SFTP Rating (1.0-5.0): 4.8
End of article.
Article copyrighted by REALbasic Developer magazine. All rights reserved.
|
