serverside flash client for ftp

Question

I am looking for a ftp client that runs on the server side and is hopefully free. I have found several applets that will do this, but our ISP doesn't support Applets of any kind(Even simple ones that say hello world). I need a no brainer way for people to upload a file to our FTP site. So I am looking for away around this for our Joomla site.

Answer 1

As far as I know there's no such thing, and even if it existed you would probably have lots of problems to get it running in your scenario, where the host that serves up the swf isn't the same as the host that the swf must deliver the files to. And to make things worse, the destination host is ftp so I don't see how it would be capable of serving up crossdomain.xml that if I recall correctly would be absolutely necessary to instruct the swf to establish the connection. Similar issues will exist with Java applets, by the way.

But there are some alternatives you may want to consider:

1. use http upload to your website and use php's integrated ftp client functions to finally deliver the file to your ftp server.
2. set up an http server on your site, alongside the ftp server and install one of the very comfortable web filemanagers on it (many to choose from in various languages, have a look at phpfm or extplorer (has a nifty feature to have it interact with an ftp server, but I never played with that facility))
3. install the web filemanager on your existing webserver - extplorer should function nicely in a Joomla context according to the information on their website.

With all 3 scenarios you also eliminate the need of your customers to run ftp, something that can simplify the life of those that live behind restrictive corporate proxies that often don't allow ftp access.