Niklas | 
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01 13th, 2008| 
After way to long time in the Apache Incubator, one of the open-source projects in which I’m involved, FtpServer has finally graduated. Our new home is as a subproject under Apache MINA. MINA, being one of my favorite projects, feels like the perfect home. Ever since I wrote an FtpServer Listener implementation based on MINA, I’ve been amazed by how well design the API is.
Since the FtpServer community recently voted to drop our support for Java 1.4, that means we can drop our blocking IO implementation. So, I’m currently in the progress of rewriting our code to make full use of MINA, rather than treating as yet another IO API. Its been great. I’ve been able to drop a large set of ill-designed classes which should make our code significantly easier to work with.
Being part of MINA also means that we will be more visible to more developers, something that will hopefully help us build a larger community. The future for the project is looking bright.
Starting today, Apache Incubator FtpServer JARs are available from the Apache snapshot repository. This should make it easy to use FtpServer in your Maven 2 build. Just declare the following dependency and you’re done.
<dependency>
<groupId>org.apache.ftpserver</groupId>
<artifactId>ftpserver-core</artifactId>
<version>1.0-incubator-SNAPSHOT</version>
</dependency>
Currently, the snapshots will be deployed manually, but I’m working on getting a CI build up and running that would also deploy snapshots automagically.
This weekend I checked in support for the draft-twine-ftpmd5-00 proposal for MD5 support in Apache Incubator FtpServer. In short, the draft adds two new FTP commands, MD5 and MMD5. Both adds the possibility of requesting the MD5 for one (MD5 command) or multiple (MMD5 command) files. This is an important piece of functionality if you want to do automated transfers over FTP. Using the commands, a client can upload a file and then request the MD5 hash and compare it to the hash of the local file. Similary, it can request the hash of a file to be downloaded to ensure that the file is downloaded without any corruption. All in all a very useful addition to FTP. To bad the draft never seemed to have gotten anywhere in the standards process.
