I want (barely computer literate) people to easily submit a large number of files (pictures) through my web application. Is there a simple, robust, free/cheap, widely used, standard tool/component (Flash or .NET - sorry no java runtime on the browser) that allows a web user to select a folder or a bunch of files on their computer and upload them?
swfupload, the best tool I know that lets you do that. Simple, easy to use and even has a fallback mechanism for the 1% web users that don't have flash 8+.
I found that the best way to upload a bunch of files is to zip them and upload a single file (and then decomress it on server). However that's probably not a good option for the audience you are targeting.
We had a company come up with a Silverlight upload that could resize the pictures before hand so that the 5MB files didn't have to be uploaded and then resized. The image resizing capability wasn't included with the clr that comes with Silverlight. Occipital came up with their own. You can see it here:
http://www.occipital.com/fjcore.html
I don't know what they would charge, but we have been extremely happy with how it works. If you don't need the resize capability before uploading then I would go with one of the flash upload options like http://swfupload.org or http://www.codeproject.com/KB/aspnet/FlashUpload.aspx
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I'm writing an upload functionality for a website (Javascript, ASP.NET). The requirement is that the user would upload a large folder of multiple files (~20k files having ~3GB in total). We would like to save the user from most of the trouble with reuploading failed files.
I've seen that some websites allow you to download desktop app for uploading and downloading files. I'd like to write something similar. I've been doing some research on the internet but I can only find JavaScript/Flash/etc. web solutions for that.
Do you know any tutorials on how to do it? Or maybe some article which explains possible ways of implementing that. Do you think my approach is good or should I invest some time in web solution instead of desktop app?
You can use dropzone. İt seems useful to file upload functionalities
Here is what I think my website should be able to provide to user.
Ability to upload file to the system. It should not blocking, user should be able to surf other pages of the website while upload is ongoing. Once upload is done user will get notified about upload.
User should be able to view of his/her uploaded files in website.
Ability to edit files in web browsers using third party APIs
Number of user are going to be around 5000, and all of them might upload files at the same time so performance should not decrease.
Where should I store this files? How to make sure that read and write of files on this directory should handle concurrent user request?
Considering above points. What should be the best way to architect this website?
Are there any existing web framework that play along with this type of architecture like rails, express?
If you want to have the ability to browse the site while a file is uploading, you'll want to use something on the front end that overrides anchor tags and asynchronously fetches the next page - there might be a library or something to accomplish this but it should be easy to implement yourself with jQuery.
To make this easier (and for many other reasons), you'll almost definitely want to structure your site with an MVC (Model View Controller) architecture. Rails is structured this way, as is almost any web framework. It doesn't sound like what you're describing is better suited to Rails over PHP or Python etc so just use whatever language or framework you (or your developers) feel most comfortable with. You might want to do some research into available plugins for editing files (it really depends on what type of files you want to edit and how) and using those to influence your decision on which language to choose as well.
With regards to storing files on your server, any logical system should suffice. Perhaps:
/username/year/month/day/myFile.txt
You'll want to do something to ensure filenames don't clash as well. And obviously you'd want a database storing the information linking files to users.
I've done a good bit of research to find an upload component for .NET that I can use to upload large files, has a progress bar, and can resume the upload of large files. I've come across some components like AjaxUploader, SlickUpload, and PowUpload, to name a few. Each of these options cost money and only PowUpload does the resumable upload, but it does it with a java applet. I'm willing to pay for a component that does those things well, but if I could write it myself that would be best.
I have two questions:
Is it possible to resume a file upload on the client without using flash/java/Silverlight?
Does anyone have some code or a link to an article that explains how to write a .NET HTTPHandler that will allow streaming upload and an ajax progress bar?
Thank you,
Austin
[Edit]
I realized I do need to be able to do resumable file uploads for my project, any suggestions for components that can do that?
1) Is it possible to resume a file upload on the client without using flash/java/Silverlight?
No. The actual HTTP protocol itself does not support resume of partial uploads, so even if you did use flash or silverlight, you'd still need to use something else like FTP on the server.
I've "solved" this problem in the past by writing a custom client application in C# which broke the file down into small chunks (2meg), transmitted those separately, and then the server combines them all back together.
2) Does anyone have some code or a link to an article that explains how to write a .NET HTTPHandler that will allow streaming upload and an ajax progress bar?
While this doesn't solve the 'resume' problem, I've used SWFUpload on the client side and it worked brilliantly. It provides a smart file browser (where you can prompt the user for only jpeg files, etc) and upload progress tracking, all without needing to modify your server at all.
It's not possible to resume an upload using standard HTML file input control, because the whole file gets submitted with the HTTP request.
I've used NeatUpload in the past, which gives you a progress bar. It's under an LGPL license, so you don't need to pay for it and it's open source.
Nothing more to add about the resume problem.
I used (and keep on using) telerik radUpload and I am quite satisfied with it
(it can even be used in medium trust mode which was quite important for me). The only problem I had (and was not able to fix) is to upload files bigger than 2GB...
SlickUpload is pretty solid and a lot of big companies use it from what the site says.
This is probably too late for your project, but POW Upload have now implemented auto resume upload in their new version. We're about to implement it on our site.
I'm looking for a simple mp3 control, my project is an ASP.NET web site (VS2008/C#), I've searched a lot but there was no luck, how can I give my users a small mp3 player control which enables them to pause/stop/change music? I want it to be usable in all major browsers, and of course no Silverlight as SL is still not widely supported, what are my options?
thanks
Without knowing more details here is my suggestion.
You can use one of the many open source flash players available. These players can play MP3's. Flash is installed by more than 90% of all browsers. You could also use a service like HulkShare that will allow you to upload your files then give you the HTML required to embed it into your site.
I'm about to start a project where there will be a Flash application where the visitor customizes a profile with externally loaded images and texts. Then the visitor needs to be able to download that profile as a dynamically created swf with all that external content baked into the swf.
Any ideas how to achive this?
Thank you!
Which aspect are you curious about? The overall workflow of setting up the server-side architecture? Information on tools that can generate SWFs? Or information on the SWF format itself?
As for tools, here are a few options off the top of my head:
The Flex SDK (i.e. mxmlc) will compile a pure AS3 project with embedded assets. If you've got reasonable control over the server, and don't mind a relatively heavyweight approach, that's probably the most "supported" way to go.
SWFMill (http://www.swfmill.org) has its own XML format for generating SWFs and importing assets. It's not quite up-to-date on newer SWF formats, but that may not matter depending on the requirements.
www.swftools.org has a few things that may be useful.
haxe.org has several options for generating SWFs.
If your question is about generating the format from scratch, all those projects are open-source, and personally, I've found the haxe sources to be the easiest reading. The library you want is http://code.google.com/p/hxformat/. Taking a look at the swf format spec might be helpful as well: www.adobe.com/devnet/swf/.
Or were you looking for more step-by-step detail?
(note: sorry for the lack of active hyperlinks, apparently the system doesn't believe I'm human yet :)
I believe you would have to create the SWF on the server side and then either
1) provide the user with a URL
or
2) dynamically load it in to your application and use it as the target for a button click, or something like that.
There are a number of ways to create SWFs on the server, but that's an area outside of my experience. Maybe someone else can post some better information on it, but here's a link to one approach, to get you started.
http://www.sephiroth.it/weblog/archives/2006/02/swf_server_side_compiler_with.php