GiFT
giFT stands for
giFT: Internet File Transfer. It is a
daemon that is intended to act as a bridge to combine the capability of using several (
peer-to-peer or otherwise)
file sharing protocols for a simple
GUI client. It uses the 'plugin' paradigm to dynamically load different protocols for a client as and when required. The currently supported networks include
Gnutella,
Ares Galaxy and
OpenFT, giFT's own file sharing network. A
FastTrack network (used by
Kazaa) plugin is in
beta, and there is also an
alpha OpenNap plugin.
A lightweight
protocol is used by clients to communicate with the giFT process, allowing the protocol code to be completely abstracted from the
user interface. There are already several GUI front-ends available for giFT for use under
Windows,
Macintosh, and
Linux.
giFT has strong ties with its sibling project
OpenFT, a peer-to-peer file sharing
network protocol that incorporates the concept of 'search' nodes and 'index' supernodes in addition of common nodes.
giFT was written using relatively
cross-platform C code. At the time of this writing giFT 0.11.6 has been released--using an up-to-date version requires pulling the
source code from
CVS and compiling it manually.
According to the giFT documentation:
"Search nodes handle search requests. They search the filelists their CHILD (common) nodes submitted to them. These nodes must have a capable Internet connection and at least 128M RAM. A modern processor is highly recommended as well."
and
"INDEX nodes keep lists of available search nodes, collect statistics, and try to maintain the structure of the network."
giFT currently doesn't have
unicode support included, so it's not possible to share files with characters such as "ø","ä", "å", "é", "è", "ó", "ö", "ù", "ü" in their names.
*
giFT (Official Website)
*
About giFT* The
giFT-FastTrack project page* The
giFT-OpenNap project page*The
giFT-Ares plugin website
