[peterkelly]

LOL yes ;)

What happened to FTP anyway? I know there were a number of issues with it (security, working through NAT, lack of a standard directory listing format etc); but these were all problems that people managed to solve in different ways.

It just goes to show how far how our industry is willing to embrace change for the sake of change (with the results sometimes being inferior) every time a new buzzord appears. I reckon a modernised version of FTP would do the job pretty well.

What I'm mainly concerned with at the moment is building something that recognises a widely-adopted protocol is going to be very difficult politically to achieve (and get implemented), but a library which abstracts over the different protocols would relieve most of the pain.

[vidarh]

People didn't "solve" those problems so much as hack their way around them in a wide variety of ways with no standardization, that is the problem. Having to occasionally support customers that need FTP servers, I can tell you that it is a never-ending nightmare of incompatible clients, server settings that must be set differently depending on customer requirements just because of issues with FTP, and firewall problems (on the customers side, though it also creates hassles on our end).

Pretty much anything would be better than FTP.

[nly]

> What happened to FTP anyway?

It's too hard to set-up for casual file sharing (backup, docs, photos etc.), and it's less efficient and scalable than BitTorrent for wide file distribution (piracy).

Perhaps with HTTP 2.0 and IPv6 looming though, we will see some progress on an FTP 2.0 that resolves the issues you mentioned.