Archive for March, 2006

FTPX

Long time since my last update, but I’ve been silently updating certain aspects of this site. In particular, the Firefly page is up and the Shoebox backup page is up. I think I’m picking up a knack for this web design thing. The pages I’m creating now are still fairly simple, but they certainly look better than anything I was able to do a year or so ago.

In other news, I got a little job through Nilesh to make an FTP client for uploading photos. I would have loved to do this in C# with the .NET Framework and WinForms, but since this has to be supported on Win 9x and it has to be available to novice users who just want to fire up the exe and don’t like scary dialogs asking them to install the framework, I had to resort to other measures. I ended up choosing wxWidgets and working in wxDevC++. It’s no where near as nice as the stuff from MS, but I’ve found it to be pretty solid in terms of features and fairly easy to use as well. My one major pain on the this project so far has actually been the compile time of wxDevC++. It’s increadibly slow and even making a small update requires a fairly significant amount of time to build the executable.

I’ve also found it difficult to find an SFTP client library. What I’m currently doing is using the PuTTY source, the PSFTP component and writing a wrapper on top of it to simplify file transactions. This approach is working well despite some headaches and ugly code with trying to interface between C++ and C code (I left the PSFTP code to compile as C source files, since there appears to be some hardcore C stuff in the PSFTP source and I was afraid of what things would break if I converted everything to C++. When I get a bit more time I will see if I can do a pure C++ compile however).

Anyways, here an early preview shot of FTPX: