Re: Using libwww's FTP facilities...

I'm sorry I'm not able to help with the specific ftp functionality in
libwww, but I would like to emphasize a point that you may already realize:
using the Win32 Internet API is a Bad Thing.  Basically, if you use this
API, you become dependent on two DLLs: shlwapi.dll and wininet.dll.  These
are part of IE and change frequently from revision to revision of IE.  I
found that the behaviour of these DLLs changed in non-trivial ways between
the revisions.  To make matters worse, many many 3rd party applications
install these DLLs because of the way Microsoft has structured Window's
dependence on IE.

What I found was that my little app which was doing a simple HTTP GET would
break every other time I installed some 3rd party software on the same
machine.  Needless to say, this made me a bit jaded about the whole IE
thing, and is why I now quite happily use libwww.

I do share some of your concerns about the way libwww is structured and the
complexity involved in using it.  However, I would encourage you to press
on rather than use the deceptively simple Win32 Internet API.

Best of luck,
Joel



At 03:35 PM 4/3/00 -0500, you wrote:
>Been looking at libwww and I'm wondering something... How do you actually do
>things with the FTP stuff?
>
>The only other ftp library i've used is the FTP stuff that comes with MFC...
>and if I was using it I could just go:
>
>    session_ptr = new CInternetSession();
>    connection_ptr = d_session_ptr->GetFtpConnection("192.168.1.1", "me",
>"mypasword");
>    connection_ptr->PutFile("my-file.txt");
>    connection_ptr->GetFile("foo.dat");
>    connection_ptr->SetCurrentDirectory("/home/me");
>
>But I haven't been able to find anything that tells me how to do stuff like
>this using libwww...?
>
>As far as I can tell, I have to include HTFTP.h?  But I don't see any
>functions like putfile getfile... unless i'm missing something?
>
>Also, I'm wondering... seems like there's an awful lot of compile time
>dependencies everywhere... headers including other headers without redundant
>include guards, things of this nature... is anyone else concerned about
>this?


-----------------------
Joel DeYoung
Maple Ridge, BC, Canada
joel@deyoung.net
http://joel.deyoung.net

Received on Monday, 3 April 2000 16:47:23 UTC