Implement FTP server

[Nicklas Nordborg]

Batch uploading of files can be much easier with a FTP server than through the web interface.

[base]

The FTP server would be very helpful for us too (Bob@VectorBase).

[Jari Häkkinen]

We are waiting for proof of concept from the Proteios team, ​http://www.proteios.org

[base]

Just saw that there's a ZIP file unpacker plugin - so that would do the job.

[base]

(last comment was by Bob)

[Nicklas Nordborg]

The Apache team is working on a new FTP server software. It seems interesting since it is highly configurable/pluggable via various API:s. It seems like it is possible to plug-in your own user manager, your own file upload/download handlers, etc... The project is in the 'incubator' phase and has not yet been released. I don't know how far it is from beeing released, but it may be worth having a look at it, since many operating systems allows simple drag-and-drop files operations between local hard disk and FTP folders.

Here is the URL: ​http://incubator.apache.org/ftpserver/

[Nicklas Nordborg]

It seems like the Apache FTP server has been bumped up a level. The project has moved to ​http://mina.apache.org/ftpserver.html.

[Nicklas Nordborg]

I have been playing with this a little bit the last week. It was not very hard to get most of it going. Everything needs to be polished up since right now the code only runs from within Eclipse. The big question is how to distribute this. I have been thinking of some alternatives:

1. As a separate application. The drawback with this is a huge overhead since we need a complete BASE Core distribution packaged in a different way. The current Tomcat-centric core distribution will not work out of the box. The benefit is that a separate application is not tied to something else. It can run from it's own server and doesn't depend on the Tomcat web server.

2. As part of the core distribution. It is simple to add a servlet to the core distribution that as soon as Tomcat starts up also starts up the FTP server code. The benefit is the simple setup. All that needs to be done is some configuration (ports, passwords, etc.). The drawback is that we are bloating the core distribution with something not everybody needs.

3. As an extension to the core distribution. The current extension mechanism doesn't allow us to do this as a 100% pure extension. Some changes to core configuration files (eg. web.xml) still needs to be done and JAR files needs to be installed into WEB-INF/lib. The benefit is that the FTP server will be a separate package with it's own life cycle. The drawback is the slightly more difficult installation (but this could be fixed by enhancements to the extension system).

Personally, I vote for option 3.

[Nicklas Nordborg]

Moved to ​http://baseplugins.thep.lu.se/wiki/net.sf.basedb.ftp