Catalyst Development

We’ve reached another milestone with the development of SocketTools 6.0, and are getting ready to make it available for beta testing. To participate in the beta test, we have a form that you’ll need to complete that provides us with some basic company information, along with a signed non-disclosure agreement. We’ll be using our forums to provide access to the software, as well as provide a means for developers to offer feedback, submit bug reports and request additional features. If you’re interested in participating in the test, please make sure that you register on our forums using your full name and the same email address that you use when submitting the request to join the beta test.

So what new features will SocketTools 6.0 include? Here’s a broad overview of what you can expect in the upcoming release, and what we’re looking for developers to help test and evaluate:

Support for the SSH (Secure Shell) protocol. This is the most significant new feature of the new release, and includes support for both interactive terminal sessions and file transfers. Each SocketTools Edition will include a component or library that provides a seamless interface to the protocol. For interactive terminal sessions, the SSH component will be very similar to the TELNET component that is already included. This will allow developers to upgrade their code to support both TELNET and SSH without significant changes to their underlying code. The SSH component also supports remote command execution, with the command’s output being returned back to the caller in a string or byte array buffer.

Integrated support for SFTP as part of the existing FTP API and components. Another aspect of the new SSH support in version 6.0 will be support for the SFTP protocol built-in to the current FTP components and library. This means that adding SFTP support to your existing applications will typically only require changing a few options. We expect this to be the most heavily used (and tested) new feature, and we’re looking for developers to test against a wide array of SSH/SFTP servers.

A new general purpose server component and library designed to simplify the development of Internet-based server applications. One of the most significant features of this component is that it offers a complete framework for building a multi-threaded server. It’s included as an extension of the existing SocketWrench API, and is also implemented as separate .NET and ActiveX components. The interface was designed to be as simple and straight-forward as possible, with an event-driven model, similar to how asynchronous sockets are managed using the current SocketWrench component.

A new message store API that is designed to make it easier to create, manage and search email messages stored on the local system. The messages are stored in a format that is similar to the de facto standard UNIX mailbox format, and mailbox files can be downloaded from a UNIX system and used as-is. For those applications that need to store MIME formatted email messages or newsgroup articles locally, this new component will make that easy to do.

We’re only going to accept a limited number of new testers, so if you’re interested we recommend that you visit our website and submit a request to join. Developers who have tested previous versions of SocketTools will be sent invitations to join directly. Because of export restrictions on products that use strong encryption, we will be unable to make the beta release available to developers outside of the United States. This won’t be an issue when the final product is released, but providing a beta release with the appropriate export license exemptions would require its own separate (and lengthy) review process, independent of the final version of the software.