Shopping Cart/Download System

Anon

I've got the following scenario:
A remote FTP Server (running under NT4) with all sort of documents. On my page the users can download documents from this ftp server (the whole thing is still in the planning phase, so there is no functionality complete right now), I think the PHP FTP functions can handle this, but now comes the tricky part:
I want the users also to be able to have a shopping cart in which they can put the documents they want to download, if they're done with their selection, they press the "download cart" button and get all the documents they requested as a single zip file ...
My question is: Has anyone heard of a system that covers this functionality (or maybe has someone a system with that functionality and want to share it with me 🙂?
Yes, I've been on hotscripts, phpRessourceIndex, devshed and some more script sites... 🙁
Additional note: Because the downloads are free, there is no need for a secure shopping cart ...

Thanks in advance
cya Rob

[deleted]

Building a basket is simple, and described on this very site, in the articles.

The problems start with the FTP server.
You are on a different server, so any file you want to send would have to be downloaded from the FTP server by your webserver before they can be zipped. Bad.

If you have a local copy of the files on your webserver, you could simply issue a ZIP command through exec etc, to get the files into one big file to send it.

A workaround could be a simple "zipserver" on the ftp server, that you can talk to to zip files.
Your webserver could ask the zipserver to zip a number of files into a file with a new name, and you could then offer that name to the client to download.

Anon

whow, I'm nearly as good as a bot 🙂) really that was the way I thought about doing it (except i was/am not so sure about the webserver/ftp server/client communication) ... But I'm a lazy human so I thought that I'm definitaly not the first one having that great idea and maybe I could save me a lot of work by getting a "ready to go" script ...
But what I'm interested in is the "zipserver" you mentioned, how would you do that ??

thanks for the input
cya Rob

[deleted]

Nah, scratch the zipserver idea, you are running windows on your FTP server. 🙁

Under unix you can put any script you like as a service behind a port.
So if someone connects to your Unix FTP server you can automatically make the server start the "zipserver" script.
It's then possible to talk to the script through sockets, much like you talk to an FTP server asking for files etc.

It's really not that hard.... on unix...