Ftp or http or what?

Question

I'm trying to figure out which technology to use. Here's what I need to do:
Currently, my boss goes to a website that displays a login form, and eventually he clicks his way to a listing of URLs to data files that need to be downloaded. This other company posting the information uses servlets to retrieve the data and construct these files dynamically (as far as I can tell). We're going to get much more data in, so I need to automate this process.
I initially assumed I would need to try to open an FTP connection to their site in Java, so I was looking at the Apache Commons Net package. I assume that then I'd have to post the initial forms (login, etc) in Java, and then parse the listing page to find the live URLs to the files. However, I don't want to do this (e.g. learn the Apache Commons Net API) if there's a simpler way. For instance, should I be able to use classes like HttpURLConnection in the java.net API to do all of my interaction with their site? All I know is that when I access their site, it's an https connection. If it's not as easy to use stuff that Sun provides, then by all means I'll try to do it with the Apache package.
I just don't want to start coding if my approach is not right!
Thanks for any advice,
Stephen

Answer 1

you can't browse the site structure use a URLConnection..you have to use FTP to do that. You can however download a file using URL connection
URL url = new URL("ftp//login:[email protected]/subdirectory/filename");
edtFTP offer a simple FTP api (much more simplier than Apache)
example:
FtpClient client = new FTPClient(host, port);
client.login(user, password);
client.debugResponses(false); // switch on or off debug of responses
client.setType(FTPTransferType.ASCII); // binary transfer
client.setConnectMode(FTPConnectMode.PASV);
String dirListing[] = client.dir(".", false); // get directory
etc..
I think it's free
http://www.enterprisedt.com/downloads/ftp/faq.html