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There’s no standard for HTTP file uploads, with all the permissions that come along with it. Eg you can POST a file to a path, but the behavior is undefined, as
by drb91 8y ago
There’s no standard for HTTP file uploads, with all the permissions that come along with it. Eg you can POST a file to a path, but the behavior is undefined, as is authorization, etc. S3 is probably the closest thing to replacing FTP, and I would hazard a guess that there just isn’t sufficient reason to dump ftp and upgrade infrastructure.
Ftp is surprisingly common when integrating between parties, and this can be expensive to change for non technical reasons.
- treve 8y agoThe standard to replace FTP is/was WebDAV. It's not a very modern standard, but it's a standard.
- drb91 8y agoGood point; I never used that directly. Why do you think that hasn’t supplanted FTP?
- dragonwriter 8y agoBecause SFTP is a better fit for simple (but secure) file transfer, WebDAV handles a lot more, but it's overkill for most of the things FTP was used for. OTOH, AFAICT, SFTP has largely replaced FTP for the system-to-system role (though ad hoc HTTP-based protocols are also common.)
- drb91 8y agoI agree re: the sftp point; people often refer to it as ftp given the interface mimicry.
- amaccuish 8y agoFor me I've always found WebDAV to my owncloud server from Windows and Mac dreadfully slow. The sync client itself that uses WebDAV is just fine, so I'd put my guess on poor integration and client implementations.
- londons_explore 8y agoMicrosoft kinda broke WebDAV by adding various incompatible extensions and building a horribly broken client into Windows. When users found out about all the issues, they preferred sticking to the old FTP, having a desktop sync app (eg. Google Drive), or using a WebUI for managing files (eg. Dropbox's website) etc.
- fulafel 8y agoOr the S3 protocol, if de facto standards count.
- ahje 8y agoPUT request with HTTP authentication is quite standardized, isn't it? The problem isn't that there are no standardized way of doing it. The problem is that the existing standardized way of doing it has no adoption, because it's not really optimal for current needs.
- oconnor663 8y agoCould you say more about that? Is it just a question of integrating smoothly with websites and cookies, or is it a performance issue?
- ahje 8y agoFrankly, I don't know why most people have chosen to use POST requests instead of PUT. Browsers and servers usually support both PUT and HTTP authentication, and when used over HTTPS it should be quite safe.
- ape4 8y agoWith FTP you login and are then in your home directory. Then you upload. With HTTP authentication is a home directory required? Can you do `pwd` to query your home folder. Some FTP clients allow standboxing where you are in /home/user folder but `pwd` says `/`.
- tptacek 8y agoThere are like at least 3 different mainstream ways to "log in" to a web server, and all of them are more straightforward than FTP's insane mainframe-era control-channel/data-channel design. The "sandboxing" you're referring to is a serverside chroot, for what it's worth. And, of course, web servers have been doing that since NCSA httpd.
- drb91 8y agoIn this case, choice may not be a benefit for coordination. If there’s one way to do it, there’s much less to communicate and debug.
- dragonwriter 8y ago> There’s no standard for HTTP file uploads There is a well-established and widely-support IETF standard mechanism (consisting of several IETF standards) for that; it's called WebDAV. > S3 is probably the closest thing to replacing FTP, SFTP is much closer to replacing FTP, to the point that people often say FTP when they mean SFTP, which underlies most non-HTTPS enterprise integrations I've seen in the last decade. But SFTP isn't FTP (not even FTP-over-TLS, which is FTPS, which has much less use.) > Ftp is surprisingly common when integrating between parties SFTP is very common. FTP (including FTPS) is surprisingly common in the sense that any use of it is surprising given the well-established, battle tested, and superior in every way alternatives that are readily available.