1. Introduction
I recently came across two useful tools that should be especially useful for Internet website developers and maintainers. They are:
– gftp
– kompozer
You will find a short introduction below.
2. The Gnome FTP client
It is a GNU and Open Source visual FTP client (similar to Filezilla or the well-known CuteFTP in Windows) with a GTK + GUI that is published under the GNU license. It is mainly for Linux and Unix systems, but it can also be used on Mac OS and Windows.
It supports the FTP, FTPS HTTP, HTTPS, SFTP and FSP protocols; It supports proxy server for the FTP and HTTP and FXP protocols, which allows transferring files between two remote servers via FTP.
The GUI interface has two main panels, the left one for the local machine and the right one for the remote machine. You can choose the directories on the local and remote machine and request to transfer the chosen files from the local machine to the remote machine or vice versa. Below these two panels, the program displays a message queue where the user can check the progress status of the transfers.
There is also a bookmarks menu that allows you to quickly connect to remote sites.
In the past, I used to work with line-oriented lftp, but found that I could do much more and faster using this GUI-based tool.
I installed the tool, without any problem, on my OpensuSE 10.2 and OpenSUSE 11.0 systems using an RPM-based package.
3. The Kompozer web authoring tool
Kompozer is a simple WYSIWYG HTML and CSS editor. It is a complete web authoring system that combines web file management and easy-to-use WYSIWYG web page editing capabilities found in Microsoft FrontPage, Adobe DreamWeaver, and other high-end programs.
The tool has a GUI interface that displays different views of the same document, such as the HTML source, tag, or external view in different panels. You can easily switch between these views and make changes to an HTML or CSS document in the most convenient way. It also has a built-in FTP function.
Kompozer is a small-size, high-speed standalone tool based on Gecko, Mozilla’s design engine.
I installed the application without any problem on my OpenSUSE 10.2 and OpenSuSE 11.0 systems using the RPM package that can be downloaded from the official kompozer site.
4. Conclusion
The two products described above are good examples of functionally advanced applications that can be easily installed on Linux machines.