Subtitles of the Movie

This module is about the Internet protocol known as FTP. FTP stands for File transfer protocol. It's a general purpose protocol used to transfer any type of file, not just web pages. Http tends to be dedicated to web pages and their support files such as images and sounds and so forth where as FTP can be used to transfer anything. Now technically http can also be used to transfer anything but FTP came along before http and is the, if you like the grand daddy of all file transfer protocols on the Internet. Now again in the client server architecture, you must have an FTP server running somewhere, the FTP server will typically be sitting there saying 'here are a whole collection of files that are available' or if you like here is a space where files can be put and an FTP client is then run which connects to the FTP server and either requests that a file be transferred from the server to the client, in other words a, what’s typically called the download or a transfer could be initiated from the client to the server, which is typically called an upload. Now when you’re going to actually publish your website, this is the reason I’m mentioning FTP in the first place you’ll most probably use FTP to get files from the computer where you’re developing the website onto the computer where they’ll be sitting in the public place where they can be viewed by the rest of the Internet. In other words, the web server. We need a mechanism for transferring the files from one computer to another and FTP is typically used for that, not always, just typically. Have you used FTP before? Well you probably have even if you don't know it. If you've downloaded something from the Internet. Say a program from the Internet, or perhaps an mp3 file or something, you may have used FTP for transfer even if you’re using a web browser, the reason for this is that your web browser is not just a http client it can also function as an FTP client, a relatively simple one, most web browsers can only do one way FTP transfers. In other words, they can only do downloads; it's a very rare web browser that can do an upload as well. Let’s have a look at some examples of this. Here is a typical website, a web page. This is from Noteworthy Software, I don't know who they are, I just stumbled across them on the net, apparently they do music software, they’re getting a free bit of advertising from me now whoever they are. O.k. now we've got two links on this page, well we've got several links on this page but we've got two links that I want to focus on. One is supposedly to download this simple Noteworthy composer 1.7 32 bit and the other one is a 16 bit version of the same thing. Now when I move my mouse over the link, look down in the very bottom left hand corner of my screen, it says ftp://ftp.noteworthysoftware.com /someexefile. The very interesting part about that link is that it is going to be transferred using FTP. As soon as I click on that, this web browser is going to contact the machine called ftp.noteworthysoftware.com, which will be theoretically and hopefully running a piece of FTP server software and it’s going to request that particular file from it. So let's see what that looks like when we actually click on it. Click and we wait and there we are. It initiates a file download. Now it’s quite possible to do a file download without using FTP, you can do file downloads using http as well. But I just wanted to show you that as far as your web browser is concerned, it’s completely ambivalent, it doesn't matter whether it is FTP or http, it’s quite happy to do a file download. Now I won’t save this file at the moment because I don't know what it is and I don't think I want it, but I will show you another example. I’m going to use my web browser to contact an FTP server by simply typing in the FTP server’s name. You can see that I’ve done this before. FTP using the FTP protocol, I’m going to contact ftp.microsoft.com and see what we end up with. Okay, here we have a collection of directories. I could go into products and see what products are available in here Now there is a front page and there is a file called change server.sh whatever that does. Click on it, let’s have a look. Okay, well it’s actually downloaded it to us but let’s try another one that it won’t actually display on the screen for us. Let’s try this zip file here, click on that and again a file download occurs. Okay, so my web browser functions as a very simple FTP client. Later on in the course I’ll be showing you more sophisticated FTP clients, ones that are capable of doing downloads, uploads and very sophisticated I guess is the best word, tasks with each of those downloads and upload types other things beside downloads and uploads. There is in fact a chapter on publishing your websites and in there we'll learn all about FTP. Finally, if you do need an FTP program, an FTP client to publish your website, you will find that actually most web publishing software packages such as Dreamweaver and FrontPage come with FTP, FTP client capabilities. In other words, they’re quite capable of uploading your pages to your destination machine using FTP and again we’ll be having a look at all of that later on.