Review from Interact, October 1997, published by Interex, International Association of Hewlett-Packard Computing Professionals.

By Shawn M. Gordon

Software Review

In these days of distributed and dissimilar computer systems, it becomes more and more critical to find tools to manage your heterogeneous environments from a single unified program. The big question is where to draw the line regarding what you want/need to be able to manage.

I recently came across a product announcement for Whisper FTP Plus and was confused about what the product was, so I checked out the Web site and downloaded a demo. I must say that I was pleasantly surprised.

Features

Whisper FTP Plus has two basic components. The first is the FTP Explorer seen in Figure 1. This allows you to connect as many FTP servers in your network as you want and then lets you "explore" them, somewhat like the Network Explorer in Windows 95. The FTP connection setup wizard walks you through all aspects of getting onto the system. You even have the choice of making this a LAN FTP connection or one over the Internet. You will notice in Figure 1 that I have three IP address connections - my local network - and I also have a connection to the MiniSoft FTP site over the Internet. All these connections were active at the same time, which was very convenient.

The FTP Plus client allows you to do both uploads and downloads quite easily. My biggest problem with other FTP clients I have used has been uploading on the Internet, which was really inconvenient to do. Like the Windows Explorer, the FTP Explorer lets you change the file layout style to be small or large icons, sort sequence, etc.

There is not much more to the FTP Plus client, except that you can simply double-click on a file and have it pop into the high-speed Whisper Edit Plus client. The editor makes use of the FTP connection to quickly download a file into the Edit Plus editors. The Edit Plus client has all the features you need for a basic editor and some of the features you want in a code editor. Take a look at Figure 2, which illustrates four different files open across three different machines.

I was really impressed with the speed of file saves under Edit Plus. I was able to modify and save a 2,000 line file in about 1 second. Even server-based EDITOR takes longer than that sometimes. I imagine the file transfer request is sent to the server and control comes back while the save wraps up. Whatever it is doing under the hood, it is screaming fast to do it.

Examining the file in the lower right corner of Figure 2, you will see that it is a numbered COBOL file. Edit Plus puts the line numbers out in an "uneditable" region to the left of the code. If you insert a line, the numbers adjust accordingly. There are options to search and replace strings of text, and you can bookmark sections of your document and toggle through them. This makes for a handy code editor.

The toolbar has balloon help and a status line that gives you more detailed help. Also, the status line is active for all menu options, which is very handy as well. The client has extensive online help, but most of the features are fairly standard so it is not hard to get around.

Usability and Installation

Installation was a snap, the FTP Plus product installs on your PC in the standard fashion, but it makes use of your already existing FTP servers anywhere in your network; there is no need to install any host files. The product is very easy to use. As I indicated earlier, I never once needed to look at any documentation.

Reliability

I wasn't able to cause a problem with FTP Plus. I tried starting the program and shutting down one of the servers, and when I tried to access the server, it correctly reported that it wasn't available. I then tried loading a file into Edit Plus and aborted the FTP server, then made changes and saved back the file. To my surprise, the file saved with no problem, but I guess that's because the FTP client already had a session running on the host. Shows how much I understand about the way FTP works.

Other than the hang when I tried using the "send" option, I had no trouble with the reliability of the software.

Performance

The performance is something of which dreams are made. I guess it's due to the efficiency of the FTP server, but I was totally stunned by how quickly I could modify and save a 1,000 plus line file. It was faster than using a host-based editor, no doubt because the file was being transferred over the network at incredible speeds.

The overhead on the host machine is trivial, since FTP is so fast; and you are doing your work locally. You would be hard-pressed to find a spike from the FTP server. The PC-based editing is also very fast; all screen drawing was very, very quick.

Support and Documentation

Since WhisperTech is located in the UK, for me support was via e-mail. The responses were quick enough given the time difference. Perhaps if you had an urgent problem, you might have a hard time getting hold of someone. I never actually tried calling because the phone bill wasn't worth the test.

I don't know whether printed documentation is available yet, but what I received had only online help. The online help is very good, but if you are having trouble getting started, you won't even be able to get to the online help, so it's a bit of a Catch-22. There is a "Using FTP with MPE/iX Q&A" help file, and this should get you going in general if you are having any problems. I didn't have any problems, but I already had my FTP server configured and running on the HP.

Summary

I ran into some remaining minor glitches in the software. For example, if you edit a byte-stream file, it displays in the editor with one character per line. This is a known bug in the HP FTP server and perhaps will be fixed in an upcoming patch.

The only other thing I would like to see is a drag-and-drop file transfer between two FTP sites, with the option of dragging an entire group or account and having the accounting structure reproduced and the files copies. Since FTP Plus is making use of only your standard FTP server, I don't know if this will happen.

So with the enhancement requests out of the way, what did I think? Well I loved it and it seems I say that a lot lately; but I have been looking at some very nice software. I showed this to a colleague when I first received it, and his response was "Buy it" - not How much does it cost? Or anything else. I felt the same way. I found the editing portion of the software to be the best part of it; it certainly was quick and handy to use. So, go to WhisperTech's Web site and check it out, as long as you have an FTP server running somewhere.