The Underscore Archives

No, not CuteFTP. The other kind of pants.

I keep finding people wanting to attach dozens of megs of files to emails,
incoming and outgoing. Methinks it's extranet time (hot on the heels of
Mike's Intranet question!).

So, I'd like to get file transfer working in a web browser. Can't use
services like mailbigfile.com or have normal http POSTs because our extranet
would need to have FTP-like folder upload/download capabilities which you
can't do with POST requests.

Would rather not use webdav because it doesn't work so well in web browsers
themselves (e.g. Safari won't handle it, and explaining to external users
that they have to use an http:// address in the Finder will confuse them).

So I'm thinking along the lines of having an FTP client embedded in a web
page. There's such a thing for Java, but so many people's Java installations
are flaky as hell (at least on Windows) that I'd rather not. Another option
is Flash, but I don't do Flash, so not sure how easy it is. Hence this email
:)

How feasible is it to have a Flash app that's a drag-and-drop style FTP
client? Also, how feasible is it from a Flash PoV to tunnel the FTP
connection over SSL (assuming I've got stunnel at the FTP server end)? And
don't say sftp, that's a *nightmare* to set up for individually chrooted
user folders, although I could possibly tunnel the FTP connection over SSH
instead of SSL if Flash is better at that.

Or does anyone have any other ideas on having full FTP capabilities inside a
web browser, supporting IE, Firefox and Safari?

Any advice appreciated,

Oliver.