Why?

We recently needed to toggle between support for SFTP and traditional FTP in one of our applications.  In a Rails app, this is more of an annoyance than necessary because of the interface differences between Net::FTP and Net::SFTP.  Not only are the transfer and navigation methods arbitrarily different, but the way the current directory on the server is dealt with is not consistent.  I suspect these differences grow from the underlying differences in the technologies, but it would still be nice to code just one branch of code that does file transfers for either type of server.  This is Ruby, right?

What?

This was the impetus for writing the sftp-compat plugin to extend Net::SFTP, giving it all the same interfaces as Net::FTP.  The plugin is very new, but it was extracted from a real, working project we developed.  It's functional, and it's being used in production right now as we speak (rather as I write and as you read - nobody is speaking right now - it's actually very quiet here - nice and tranquil - mmm.)

How?

All of the documentation can be found at http://sftp-compat.rubyforge.org/.  There may be some functionality missing from the interface depending on your use case.  The current version was designed for writing to remote FTP hosts, so there are a few methods for reading that I never needed to implement.  If you are interested in using sftp-compat, but need the missing functions or would like to commit extra functions, please drop me an email.