I have been experimenting with Java FTP components in my effort to create a JFileChooser component that will work over FTP. Common concensus seems to be that the best FTP component is the Jakarta Commons FTPClient class. It seems to have all of the necessary functionality, however seems to have multithreading issues. The component continually deadlocks, and I have narrowed it down to the FTPClient class. I found a post at http://www.kaffe.org/pipermail/kaffe/2005-August/103033.html that also talks about deadlocking in the FTPClient. One suggested solution is to disable the separate reader thread by calling setReaderThread(false). This helps me get a little further to the point where it usually works, but nonetheless deadlocking still occurs.

I will keep on searching for another FTP component but in the mean time I have successfully adapted JFileChooser to use SFTP (Secure FTP) using the SSH Tools libraries.

References