Esftp 1.1.1: One step closer

So, ok, an update on progress

Yesterday, I managed to get the code running on Eclipse 3.2, with Java 1.4. So it should be compatible with pretty much everyone.

The site browser is now working like expected, the only last things that I have to do, before I start to test for things not working anymore are as follows:

1. Remove the code which changes the remote directory, this was a bad idea, it was basically a way to remove the need for setting the complete full path of files on the remote filesystem. But in recent days I found some bugs with it and the Java FTP library that I am now using (EdtFTPJ) works better and more reliably with full paths.

2. Once the above code works, FTP support should work also. However EdtFTPJ doesnt support TLS or SSL encrypted FTP, FTP4CHE Does, but I cannot get it to work reliably, I guess I can use both, but for now, plain FTP will be your only option for now.

3. Testing both SFTP and FTP servers, to see if I can find any problems, in both Eclipse 3.3 and Eclipse 3.2

4. Release!!

In this release there are some bug fixes, mostly NPE cleanups with some people getting nulls returned from code which for me, doesnt, so I've added some testing and fallbacks for those people who have these problems.

I am very happy with the new preferences system, it works, as expected, inheriting values from the Workspace options when there are no project values, which will make some people happy when they want to set global workspace options which define the Esftp preferences for their entire 50+ project workspaces (which I believe would be crazy, but can imagine they exist)

Another cool thing I found out is that working Esftp over a SSH tunnel works flawlessly, well, as flawlessly as you can expect anyway, to setup a tunnel to work on a non-public facing server, you can do this

ssh -l extsshlogin -L 7777:int-ssh-server:22 ext-ssh-server cat -

Something like that, will setup a tunnel from your local machine, to the external machine and then, forward all traffic on port 22, to the internal-machine, so you can route your SSH session to a normally hidden machine, from the internet's point of view anyway.

Then you setup your Esftp preferences to connect to localhost, port 7777, the internal machine's username and password and bingo, you just tunneled Esftp into that server.

I am thinking to add a tunnels category to the Esftp prefernces in esftp 1.1.2, so you can define tunnels and use them when you connect to your remote machine.

Stay hungry!