what library is better between libcurl and chilkat?

i'm newbie in FTP connection p开发者_如何学Gorogramming in Cocoa. I found 2 library that i can choose for make my app, but i dont know what's the best between these libraries. The libraries are libcurl and chilkat . The problem is what benefit of each library? Did somebody compare it? or maybe can anyone tell me about your experience? Thank you

I don't have any experience with chilkat, but I can tell yout that libcurl is used in a lot of programming languages and is available on a lot of systems. In for example PHP or on a Mac curl is a great tool to use.

So I would advice libcurl if it's available on your platform. You will probably find more information about curl and it has proven itself on many other platforms.

Also interesting if you want to go with curl is curlhandle. It's a cocoa wrapper around the curl library. Probably very handy in your case, but I've no experience with it.

I can tell you that the difference between libcurl and chilkat is like this: (though you probably know by now)

Chilkat is like the chess game you buy at the store and libcurl is like the plastic in liquid form you buy that you can make any chess piece with.

Libcurl is a slightly abstracted sockets-connector and Chilkat handles everything you'd do, up to a certain amount, with that connection. You're either staring at bits or something "made those bits into an email". I'm about to buy Chilkat for some of the libs, I like the features, but at the same time I wish I had time to read the RFC's and play with the other stuff using libcurl. Anywho, hope that answer is worth something to someone.

Because this question is still ranking high on google i give you my experience. I bought chilkat in 2015 and moved to libcurl later and my own implementation much later. Both are far from perfect. libcurl just shows it's age and some weak designs.

libCurl is an library that tries to implement all URL able protocols even if they are designed as stream protocol like FTP. Do yourself a favour and only use it with HTTP/HTTPS. It just does the transfer part. Which is not enough for handling. You would love to see at least mime and charset routines to use the downloaded files.

Chilkat is a toplevel library that tries to give you as much highlevel access as possible. It uses background threads in script languages where it is not easy to use. The problem is that the API is terrible, very little documented and total failure when you want to write a quality program. For example it returns requests as a string. There is no way for stream processing. Now imagine you download a large GB iso file, you wont be happy. It can return as a file but then you have to specify this at the begin of a request when you don't knwo the download size.

Also the code quality until proven otherwise is bad. There are a few chilkat source code snippets in the wild which you can find via google and they are pure madness. Ok we don't know how this old code has been refactored now. But it leaves a bad taste, remember this is closed source and there is not a single mention about corner cases, which protocol is implemented, which feature of protocols are implemented and so on. You are using a total black box.

Also it does not allow high performance and high value code. I used it to write a web crawler and it was much much slower then libcurl.

I later used the HTTP and SSH compoenents to automate some server/client management scripts and there it shines. You know both sides and can just test if they work together and don't get any surprises. Then it is indeed easy and better then using the broken python or ruby SSH.

But if you ever contact with another unknown server, Chilkat is not your library.