HOW-TO: remote file access from a web server ?

Question

Hello Everyone,

We have a web application which which is deployed and used within an intranet. The application reads in text files from a specified location on the web server itself.

Now we have a requirement of reading in text files from other machines as well, so i'm exploring possible options to implement this. Possible options i've been thinking of are:

1. Maybe start a ftp server on each local machine and then write a servlet to ftp given machines n read-in data.
2. Maybe run some utility program thats would read in file contents and push it back to the server using xml etc ?)

Ne help about above/or new ideas would be highly appreciated!

Technologies i'm using are : Tomcat/Struts/JSP/AJAX.

P.S i want to handle non NFS situations as well!

Thanks, Abhishek.

Answer 1

Hi, apart from the fact that I don't know whats the purpose of the application you're building, and knowing it is a Web-app, why not have users upload the specific files you want to process?, or even better, if they are configuration files, you might put them all in one single location, let's say just one machine. That might be better than having your app stuck just because some machine is not accessible.