ANNOUNCE: Back-to-Basics FTP
Ed Suominen
state handler and provides a limited functionality. By streamlining the
code and starting from the ground up*, I've produced the workings of what
appears to be a very reliable, stable FTP client**.
You can download it here:
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/tksec/btbftp.tcl
The extension also includes a procedure "ipaddress" that polls one of three
known web servers and returns your current, routable IP address (which may
not be equal to your machine's IP address).
I recoded my TKSEC software last week to use the new extension and deleted
the old one from TclLib. Much to my delight, the stability problems I had
been encountering seem to have gone away. (Previously, I would
frequently lose the FTP connection and be unable to regain it ever again.
The TKSEC software would mess up my entire Win2K instance, preventing
me from launching new programs. I don't see how FTP.tcl could have done
all that, but anyhow I hope the problem is gone for good...)
Although I've packaged the code as an extension and released it on
SourceForge it is not yet ready to be a general-purpose FTP extension. I've
only implemented the functions that I actually used in TKSEC. Because the
code is structured around a single procedure (FTP::cmd), however, adding
additional functions should be pretty easy.
It's important to remember that because the code does not include a state
handler, you cannot call an FTP command while one is still in progress or
you will interrupt the command sequence. The package provides a flag
(FTP::busyFlag) that you should check before executing a command if
other threads may be using the same FTP connection.
* I've taken about 5 lines of code from the original ftp extension.
** But as the license says, no warranties. :-)
Have fun with btbftp.tcl, and many thanks to the original FTP developers
for providing some very nice software that allowed me to get the early
stages of development done. I suspect that the original FTP fills the need
of most TCL applications just fine.
-Ed Suominen, author TKSEC (http://sourceforge.net/projects/tksec)
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