Whats next – Sharer: Better File Sharing.

Good morning. It seems I have to stay wake so i don’t oversleep. Oversleeping would mean something like missing a flight, not really desirable. 

Staying wake always makes me do weird stuff in the middle of the night. That is, reading all feeds I recently ignored, taking care of stuff that has to be taken care of ( that is university ) and scheduling my activities for the upcoming, lets say, 3 weeks. 

Blogging is definitely a part of it, as I’m not exactly happy with the posts here. I’m working on it, to be more sepcific: I’m planning to do an article series on a .. secret topic. You’ll see, but I still have to finish work on Sharer, my LAN-Filesharing utility. I’ll tell you something about it. 

Sharer is at the moment simply a damn simple binary protocol and a Application implementing it. The protocol structure is quiet simple. A connection between two clients is initiated by establishing a control-connection. Thats the one used to retrieve metadata like file information etc.. If a client wants to get a specific file, it requests a transfer connection. File is being sent over it. I’m still working on it, as it appears to be more work than I initially planned. 

This whole project is based on the idea that simple file sharing that is decentralised and restricted ( or at least primarily designed ) for use in local networks is pretty much a lame topic. Every major company is proud to have some own protocol there, them being not compatible bla bla bla. So i decided to waste some time on this proof of concept. To make it really useful and simple to use ( remember \\mycomputer or \\192.168.0.12 ? that is _not_ user friendly! ), Sharer uses the Bonjour for Java Bindings provided by Apple. The Usage is quite straightforward, and it works well. I haven’t checked out yet if these Bindings are also available for Linux, but I hope so. At least for Windows and Mac(!) they are. 

I think I’ll try to online check-in now. Window seat.

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2 Comments to “Whats next – Sharer: Better File Sharing.”

  1. anthony 14 January 2009 at 3:42 am #

    Just thought you might want to know, there is an existing drag-and-drop file sharing app for linux that uses Avahi(linux’s open source version of Zeroconf/Bonjour) called giver: http://code.google.com/p/giver/ and if you could find a way to make your implementation work then there would be flexible drag and drop filesharing available for all 3 major platforms!

    Also, giver was just included in Linux Mint, a slightly ahead-of-the-curve easy to use distro, so if you’re looking to test it they have it in the default install.

  2. momo 14 January 2009 at 8:00 am #

    Hey, thanks for the link. You are absolutely right, any effort should be made to make it work on all platforms. It seems that avahi has some kind of compatibility layer to support bonjour as well, but I have to read more about it :-) . I’m now actually dropping the idea of doing it in Java if there are already guis for windows and linux. And OS X + Java looks .. not so cool.


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