Jakarta Commons Net

Jakarta Commons Net implements the client side of many basic Internet protocols. The purpose of the library is to provide fundamental protocol access, not higher-level abstractions. Therefore, some of the design violates object-oriented design principles. Our philosophy is to make the global functionality of a protocol accessible (e.g., TFTP send file and receive file) when possible, but also provide access to the fundamental protocols where applicable so that the programmer may construct his own custom implementations (e.g, the TFTP packet classes and the TFTP packet send and receive methods are exposed).

Features

Supported protocols are:

  • FTP/FTPS
  • NNTP
  • SMTP
  • POP3
  • Telnet
  • TFTP
  • Finger
  • Whois
  • rexec/rcmd/rlogin
  • Time (rdate) and Daytime
  • Echo
  • Discard
  • NTP/SNTP

Background

Jakarta Commons Net started as a commercial Java library called NetComponents, originally developed by ORO, Inc. in the early days of Java. After its 1.3.8 release in 1998, the source code was donated to the Apache Software Foundation and made available under the Apache License. Since then, many programmers have contributed to the continued development of Jakarta Commons Net. The current version numbering scheme bears no relation to the old. In other words, Jakarta Commons Net 1.0 succeeded and supplanted NetComponents 1.3.8. The 2.0 branch of Commons Net will only run on JDK 5.0 or higher.