Transfiler

There seem to be at least three categories of FTP clients and users:

Fat
The user interface is rich and colourful and has lots of icons. For every little feature, a wizard pops up out of nowhere and urges you to create a profile, a project, or a political party. As a prove that every sinister section of this aged protocol has been read, and to separate the men from the boys, every bizarre feature wants to be configured in the settings menu which looks like an income tax form. Of course these features pollute the whole user interface by being available in the menu, in the toolbar, in the context menu and by resulting in a crude manifestation represented by the log of a dull dialog between client and server in one of the mystical, numerous parts of the window.
Medium
It looks like a good ol’ AMIGA file manager, unfortunately it seems to use the very same widgets. There’s an awkward balance between inadequate comfort and exaggerated configurability, and as the icing on the cake it crashes abruptly, offering a well-intentioned option to recover unsuccessfully after restart.
Spartan
A shell means pure power, as much as the FTP command available for it. Users of this category are keen on vi, sed, grep and other programs having less than five characters in their names. Yet, they’re astonishingly efficient while trying to find out what this little plastic device wearing three buttons next to their keyboard is needed for.

While transferring a collection of several thousand small files from one FTP server to another one, a restrictive firewall and inadequate tools of categories medium and spartan added up to the critical mass required to write an FTP client of my own, which at least was able to re-establish aborted connections and go on as if nothing happened. After some time of contentment, I started over from scratch in order to implement new features and eliminate all the architectural flaws of the former emergency version.

Special features

Being stoic
When the connection is aborted, it will be automatically re-established, and the transfer is continued.
Server-to-server
It’s possible to transfer files from one FTP server to another; the detour from server-client and client-server is done in the background.
One-to-many, many-to-one, many-to-many
It’s possible to transfer files from one directory into several others in one transfer duty. The other way round is possible, too, thus combining files from several sources to a single target directory. Last but not least, a collection of files from several directories can be transferred to several other directories.
Locale support:

Licence

Transfiler is available for free under the GNU General Public Licence. This means that source code is available and may be altered. It also means that any new software incorporating even parts of the source automatically has to be published under this licence, too.

Credits

The protocol layer is taken from Enterprise Distributed Technologies, available under LGPL
For a better-looking interface, I added the Plastic look and feel by JGoodies
Thanks to the Tango Project for all those pretty icons
Special thanks to Richard Quignon for checking and correcting the French translation

Download & run

There are three versions available: an executable JAR file (download, save, double-click), a Java Web Start application (just click the link below), and a ZIP archive containing the source files. The Web Start variant asks for full access to the local directories, which is logical for an FTP client.

Executable JAR

Java Web Start

Sources

633 K

98 K