Showcasing a few web clients I just shipped to be use with FTP and AWS S3

Some protocols and platforms need no introduction, take FTP and S3.

For many years, non IT professional have been using GUIs and CLIs that was design to offer the full flexibility of the protocols/platform they’re interconnecting with which is resulting in non IT professional believing that FTP is just too complicated to be used by normal people.

Even Dropbox says it:

File transfers shouldn’t be so hard

Let’s face it, Filezila FTP shows message that requires to read the entire FTP RFC to decypher it. This is great for advanced user, not so much for everyone else.

This is the root of the lack of mainstream appeal for all those great protocols and platforms that have been there sometimes a decade ago, they’re all marketed for techies and there’s no tool that would let my mother use FTP in the same way she uses Dropbox and that’s a problem.

Though, it isn’t an protocol problem but a tooling one, we failed to give the non IT professional a tool they love to do their job and that’s what I think Dropbox got right.

A few days ago, I’ve ship a few web clients that break from that tradition of complexity. Essentially, we made FTP and AWS S3 as easy to use as Dropbox while building on top of those protocols/platforms:

  • full text search
  • collaboration via secure shared links

This tool is Filestash, it makes your FTP looks fancy and more familiar:

Filestash is meant to be configurable as we don’t expect end users to know about all the intricacies of the underlying protocols you’re trying to connect to.

You can even create your own external login page with some basic HTML to keep your users in familiar territory. A good example of that is what we did to create dedicated pages for the FTP Client and the S3 Browser:

Online FTP ClientS3 Browser
I hope you like this. Have a good hacking!