So, just out of curiosity, what does the POST data from Gears look like? How is it structured? Jacob
On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 10:15 AM, Colin Clark <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hey everyone, > > As you know, I've been playing around with the latest version of Google > Gears, which provides support for multi-file uploads. I was hoping to use it > in as an alternative to the Flash back end in the Uploader, since we've > somewhat disappointed by the accessibility of Flash 10. > > Gears provides a pretty good API for uploads. Compared with the code required > to bootstrap SWFUpload, I was able to implement a preliminary version of the > code with significantly fewer lines of code. Gears also provides some > intriguing forward-looking features, such as the ability to do offline > uploading and to pause a file and resume it much later on. > > I hit a snag with Gears the other day, though. Anyone who's built a standard > HTTP file upload will be familiar with how they work. In short, the client > makes a POST request to the web server. The request needs to have a content > type of "multipart/form-data" so that the server knows how to correctly > process it. > > Adobe, who aren't famous for following Web standards, did the right thing in > Flash. They compose a valid multipart POST request when sending files to the > server. Thus you don't need to write any special server-side code to handle > Flash-based multi-file uploads (with a few caveats, perhaps). > > On the other hand, Gears doesn't allow you to make multipart POSTs. As a > result, users of the Uploader component would be required to write a > separate, Gears-specific handler on the server. Given that we've always > imagined that Gears support would be a "progressive enhancement" on top of > our support for Flash and plain old HTTP uploads, I'm not sure this is going > to make our users very happy. > > For now, I'm figuring we're best to shelf Gears support for the Uploader and > see if we can implement a couple of hacks to make Flash 10 more > keyboard-friendly. From what I've seen, Google is aware of the multipart POST > issue in Gears and has a fix coming eventually. At that point, we can pick > this work up and release it in a future version of Infusion. > > Thoughts? > > Colin > > --- > Colin Clark > Technical Lead, Fluid Project > Adaptive Technology Resource Centre, University of Toronto > http://fluidproject.org > > _______________________________________________________ > fluid-work mailing list - [email protected] > To unsubscribe, change settings or access archives, > see http://fluidproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fluid-work -- Jacob Farber University of Toronto - ATRC Tel: (416) 946-3002 www.fluidproject.org _______________________________________________________ fluid-work mailing list - [email protected] To unsubscribe, change settings or access archives, see http://fluidproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fluid-work
