Rad File Manager

 

Three months ago, while I was struggling with a busted hard disk, mother board stew and a fedora upgrade, Rad Inks released a new product.

I never blogged about this product and since the saying is 'better late than never', this looks like a good time. The product is a File Manager web application with a difference. The difference is that it's quite similar to something else.

Now if you are sufficiently confused please allow me to elaborate, the File Manager is modelled after an FTP client, it looks exactly like our FTP applet. The File Manager even has most of it's functionality, but the difference is that it works entirely over HTTP.

More confused? well one of the most troublesome problems many web application developers face is file handling. Rad Upload provided a solution to part of the problem - that of uploading files to the server. Downloading, directory management rename etc continued to be a problem.

For this reason many web app developers resort to the File Transfer Protocol. Unfortunately that only opens up another can of worms. Most FTP servers will not keep a record of the files in the database and they will not interact easily with your php scripts or java classes. Worse still FTP will not work behind some corporate firewalls.

So how does the Rad File Manager solve all these problems? well it provides the functionality that you expect of an FTP client in a web (HTTP) client. The software can be used to upload, download, rename, create directories, remove directories, you name it Rad File can do it. While doing so, it will keep a record of all this activity in a database. The table structures are pretty simple and can be used by other web applications very easily.

Oh, BTW did I mention that FTP is totally insecure? Rad File on the other hand can be used with SSL.