kaosFTP

kaosFTP is an X Windows FTP client currently in development. It will be the successor to an old X Motif FTP client that I wrote called xmftp.

There is no definite release date for kaosFTP. I can tell you that it is almost finished in terms of code. Keep checking this page for updates.

kaosFTP Features

kaosFTP is a major change from the previous versions in terms of code, and hopefully be much more reliable and feature-rich. It is being designed primarily in C++ using the Qt library. Please do not email me suggesting I use GTK or another toolkit. I evaluated other libraries and Qt proved to be the best for my needs.

xmftp (and many other network applications) hang or block during network system calls. kaosFTP is designed as a multithreaded application from the ground up. I first designed a threaded FTP library which is purely event-driven, and then built kaosFTP to use it. This makes the program rarely block on any network activity, but much harder to design. Hopefully I'll get it working the way I want it. Looks good so far.

Planned features:

• Explicit proxy support
• Much snappier GUI (due to multithreaded design)
• Automatic NOOP idle command
• Automatic redial until connected

There is some technical info here.

If you have any suggestions, send them to valankar@bigfoot.com . To those that are sending me mail, please don't be discouraged if I do not respond. I am definitely taking into consideration everything you send.

1-4-99

Much of the difficult code is finished. My next task is implementing an RTMode equivalent (RTMode was a feature in xmftp that kept retrying transfers if any errors occurred such as disconnects). You can take a look at a screenshot (beware this is around 200k).

3-3-2001

kaosFTP is no longer in development. Source code is available here for those interested. This is in no way a working program, and may not even compile. I'm posting it just in case anyone else finds it useful.