Uploader, Gears, and multipart POSTs

[Jacob Farber]

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 <colin.clark at utoronto.ca> 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
>
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--
Jacob Farber
University of Toronto - ATRC
Tel: (416) 946-3002
www.fluidproject.org