I recently started using Peter Hyde's products, WebQueue and WebDeploy, for automating the movement of files from my development computer up to my servers. Now that these tools are in place, I cannot believe I lived without them for so long. The irony is that these products have been in my own store (HREFShop) for *years* and I just never got around to using them for my own work.

So just in case YOU have sets of files that need to be transferred from development machine to production machine on a regular basis, let me give you a quick explanation of how this can work.

On the development (source) computer, you run a precompiled utility called WebQueue. This tool can be configured to know about one or more "sites". A site is basically a collection of files that need to be FTP'd to the same target server. WebQueue will scan the files to see what has changed, build an archive file (LZH compression) with a unique, simple name in the folder of your choice, and will then upload the archive to the target machine. Then it waits to see how well the archive is processed on the target side, and gives you very detailed status information.

On the staging or production (live/target) computer, you run EITHER WebDeploy or a WebHub application compiled with TWebCompress. WebDeploy is a precompiled utility that is excellent for testing and in some cases is sufficient to do the work. TWebCompress is a WebHub webaction component that wraps TCompress and has the same idea of "sites" as WebQueue does, except it is in charge of receiving files, uncompressing the archive to the correct place, and providing status. You really do not have to code anything, you just set up the configuration file with the site definition and the component does the rest.

The big advantage to using the component is that your app can put itself into some appropriate 'sleep' mode, giving users a message while the new data is imported. With the recent versions of WebHub, that can be done easily with the CoverApp feature (see unit whsample_EvtHandlers.pas). In older versions of WebHub, you would set TWebCommandLine.Active to False, which would give surfers a "suspended" message.

The scenario above is basically a "push" -- from development computer to deployment computer. The opposite is also possible; WebDeploy can "gather" (pull) files from the source to itself. You would choose one method or the other depending on where you wanted to have the ftp server running.

That is all -- I hope you will not delay as long as I did in automating file transfer.

Ann