There is an FTP server where I work that is within the company network. Clients send us files to our FTP server and our program routes files to certain locations within the network. Currently, I reference and access the FTP machine through mapped drives (i.e. drive letters) - that's how I access the files. But, now they're looking to have the FTP hosted (outsourced) since we've been having way too many network interruptions and trouble with our FTP in general. Herein lies my problem - since the FTP server would be outsourced and outside of our network, I no longer can access the machine through mapped drives but would have to make a program to log onto an FTP site remotely (across the internet using name/password etc) to access files that clients send us. I've looked in the standard Java API and it doesn't seem like there are any standard FTP connection classes in the JDK. The original option would have to be building it from scratch which probably would have to deal with socket/port programming which I really have no clue about.

Has anyone done something like this before? Are there standard (not contained in the standard Java API) open source classes that serve such a purpose? Thanks.

 

It's not part of the standard java package, but Sun does provide it. In a package called sun.net.ftp or com.sun.net.ftp or something like that. I used it once before, but couldn't find my old class for some reason. Let me continue looking around.

FTP protocol (active) is not something you really want to manually do yourself with sockets programming. Too tedious.

 

http://www.experts-exchange.com/Programmin...Q_20421069.html

This might be helpful. I found my code, but nothing useful there really. I think sun.net.ftp.FtpClient doesn't let you delete files though, 'cos I subclassed it and added a "delete" method (don't see why I'd have done that if the super class did it out of the box).

 

Oh, and it comes with jdk (1.3.1 and 1.4.1 these are the two version I have locally).

 

what is wrong with accessing it by username/password in internet explorer?

 

You may also look into thrid party APIs. I used the Netscape libraires to build up email functionalities in pieces of software I've used in the past. There are tons of open source libraries that can help you. You may just have to install the client software on your machine and run hooks into it from your application. If they (your client) aren't against it you could also look into using the http/s to transfer the files.

Rice

 

I am not exactly sure of why you need to make a program to log onto an ftp site when all you have to do is type ftp://blahblahblah in your address bar then enter username/password.

 

I'm assuming the ftp/copy process is only part of the application he is building. If not then, you can even map ftp drives in windows2000. If you are just looking to browse the server I would agree with 1a-race, I think you're making it more difficult then you have to

Rice

 

You can even use ftp://user:mypassword@blah.blah.blah so you don't have to type user/pw each time.

 

I believe if you do it that way it also gets added into my network places.