Developing a Robust Ftp Client in PHP

[jalitt@gmail.com]

Hello,

I've been tasked with developing a lightweight ftp client for use in
web servers. Obviously, there is no need to redesign the wheel, and
I've basically just been wrapping a class around the ftp library
functions in the php library. Now, this class works great for most
purposes, however, when it encounters a flaky ftp server, I can get
disconnected without warning.

So basically, what is the best way to handle disconnects? I want to
auto-reconnect to an ftp, I think that is the most sensible
solution(if anyone has a better one, please let me know). Is there
anyway to register a callback function that is called when
disconnected from an ftp? If not, is there anyway to poll the status
of the current ftp connection? Possibly I should just have a loop
that sleeps, calls ftp_nlist(), if that fails then it attempts to
reconnect. Then I could just spawn an ftp_client thread that
continuously monitors the ftp connection until killed. Seems like
overkill to me though.. I dunno, anyone have any better ideas?

Sincerely,

Joshua Litt

[C. (http://symcbean.blogspot.com/)]

Re: Developing a Robust Ftp Client in PHP

On Aug 6, 5:57 pm, jal...@gmail.co m wrote:

Hello,
>
I've been tasked with developing a lightweight ftp client for use in
web servers. Obviously, there is no need to redesign the wheel, and
I've basically just been wrapping a class around the ftp library
functions in the php library. Now, this class works great for most
purposes, however, when it encounters a flaky ftp server, I can get
disconnected without warning.
>
So basically, what is the best way to handle disconnects? I want to
auto-reconnect to an ftp, I think that is the most sensible
solution(if anyone has a better one, please let me know). Is there
anyway to register a callback function that is called when
disconnected from an ftp? If not, is there anyway to poll the status
of the current ftp connection? Possibly I should just have a loop
that sleeps, calls ftp_nlist(), if that fails then it attempts to
reconnect. Then I could just spawn an ftp_client thread that
continuously monitors the ftp connection until killed. Seems like
overkill to me though.. I dunno, anyone have any better ideas?
>
Sincerely,
>
Joshua Litt

Top of my list would be not to use ftp (have a google for previous
rants). But since that's not an option, next solution would be to use
a seperate connection for each transaction, closing it when completed,
and always checking for errors along the way.

There's not a lot you can do to fix other peoples' problems.

C.

[jalitt@gmail.com]

Re: Developing a Robust Ftp Client in PHP

Top of my list would be not to use ftp (have a google for previous
rants). But since that's not an option, next solution would be to use
a seperate connection for each transaction, closing it when completed,
and always checking for errors along the way.
>
There's not a lot you can do to fix other peoples' problems.
>
C.

Hah, that is a far more elegant solution then I was envisioning. I've
gone ahead and implemented that, I guess it will add a little
overhead to each transfer, but I think the pay off is worth it.

Sincerely,

Joshua Litt