Welcome!

This is the homepage of the PtokaX Remote Admin program, a small utility which helps you to easily set up Your PtokaX hub.

PtokaX is a server-software for the Direct Connect P2P network. It is currently developed by PPK and Ptaczek since May 2002, and until the ages of development, it become the well-known and best hubsoftware.

History

This project has been started in 2006. The reason was simply: in Hungary the internet connections' had (has?) very low upload speed, so the hubowners had to use dedicated servers, where remote desktop wasn't avaible, the only communication channel was a single FTP access. But PtokaX hasn't have such commands like VerliHub has, and the settings are stored in file, not in SQL, so the hub can't be managed remotely. Therefore it was impossible to set up the hub when it ran - except to ask the server's admin to stop the hub, upload Settings.xml, then start the hub. I don't need to say, it wasn't liked by the owners. :) So, I've decided to write an application which can do that through the Lua API. The first version was written in Visual Basic .NET, and it had limited features, because Ptokax's old Lua API hasn't supported everything what is related to the settings, and because I wasn't really familiar with that programming language. (And because it needs framework... Can I compel the user to install a 2-300 MB framework? I think the answer is: no.)
All in all, I decided to find a better solution. In 2007, I surfed on the net, when I found Lua-AIO. This is a program, which provides Lua interface, multithreadingand additionally, it also contains many library. I checked the examples, and I saw wxLua is a very powerful lib, so I decided to rewrite the whole application in Lua. Because of I am a Lua scripter, it was better to me, and it's even better for the users, because everything can be set up with this application (PtokaX got a new API, which supports the change of the 99% of the settings on-the-fly), and this new version had some extra features, like Lua syntax checker, later the UDP debug receiver, for example. In the August of 2008 I released the first version which was able to run on Linux OS: this is the date when Lua-AIO UNIX package was released. In the same time, PPK was also ready with the UNIX and the Windows service version of PtokaX, so the application became more useful. Not hard to find out the reason: these versions has no GUI (Graphical User Interface), and because I've added Save settings and Load settings buttons in v2.10, the users are able to use PtokaX as before.
The first releases contained an userlist too (it remained from the VB.NET version), so it was like a little DC client. Unfortunately, since there was too many problem with it, mainly on Linux, I removed it. But, I kept the useful things and I develop them as better as I can. Beside that I also added some good feaure, like password generator, permission for profiles, and so on. When I was ready with the 2.13 version in the July of 2009, I had to made this homepage, because it had too many files and versions, and since that version, the application loader Lua script is compiled.
This doesn't mean that the program is no more open source or no more free. You can use it as before, under the terms of the GNU-GPL 2 licence. I consider that open source softwares are the best choices, so all programs I have made are released under the same GNU-GPL licence. Until I made this program, I learned many things from other programmers code's, and maybe you can learn from this too.

What's next?

The main target I want to reach now is to make the hub-side script lib-free. This means you shouldn't install PxLuaFileSystem, just run the script itself. The reason of the use of this library that this is the only way I can reach the text files in the texts folder (I know that os.execute() is able to do this, but who likes the flashing shell?). So I asked PPK to implement TextMan metatable, which should work like ScriptMan metatable: TextMan.GetTexts() returns the text files from the texts folder. As soon as it will be avaible, I will implement it in the hub-side script, and you don't have to worry about PxLFS installation.

Thanks

Under the development many people helped my work. NightLitch showed me many useful trick and sample in wxLua. John Labenski, the author of wxLua helped me also a lot in wxLua on the mailing list. ATAG assisted in the Linux version, and gave me useful tips, and the wxLua install script is also his work. 11hh reported hundreds of errors and bugs, and gave many useful ideas. Maybe there are more people who helped me, and I forgot to mention them here - sorry. I want to hereby thank them their work, and want to ask everybody to make this application better. How? If you have any idea, or you have a bugreport, please report it on the forum or send it to my e-mail.