Uploading

by Nate Aune — last modified Jan 23, 2006 08:15 PM
Uploading large media files using a web browser does not give much feedback to the user. Large file uploads also consume many resources on the Zope server. We need to find ways to improve the end user experience when uploading large files, and reduce or eliminate the demands that it places on the Zope server.

Tramline

Tramline is an upload and download accelerator that plugs into Apache. Its aim is to make downloading and uploading large media to an application server (i.e. Zope) easy and fast, without overloading the application server with large amounts of binary data.

Matt Hamilton got Tramline working with Plone, but would like to wrap it up as a product and make the code less hacky.
UPDATE! Matt released PloneTramline 0.1.

Tramline integration is one of the improvement proposals for the ATVideo roadmap and issue #236 in the Plone4Artists tracker.

WebDAV

Since Zope has a built-in WebDAV server, one can upload large media files into a Plone site, by mounting the Plone site as a WebDAV share. MacOSX and Windows both provide native WebDAV clients, but unfortunately both of them poorly implement the WebDAV RFC, and therefore Zope has problems with them.

For Windows, the solution is to use a 3rd party product - Netdrive, a free product from Novell is recommended. For MacOSX, there is Goliath. The native OSX webdav client sends the resource fork which Zope interprets as a separate file, so you end up with files that begin with ._ and .DS_Store littering your Plone site.

Sidnei made some patches to ignore the resource fork info, but for some reason these patches were removed.

Tomcom has also released WebDAV Content Item Filter patch which hides non-content objects from being listed in WebDAV.

Read this howto for more info about WebDAV and ATVideo and this WebDAV howto.

PloneJUpload

PloneJUpload is a plone product that allows JUpload applet to interface with Plone. It adds an 'Upload Files' folder tab which shows the applet. You add files to be uploaded which are queued up. When you press the 'Upload' button they are uploaded into your Plone site all at once. The applet shows a progress bar so you can see how far along the upload process is.

The PloneJUpload product works pretty well, but there are a few minor issues which can probably be easily fixed during the sprint.

PloneJUpload support for the PloneMultimedia suite of products is issue #210 in the Plone4Artists tracker.

Upload from remote location

Many users may have already uploaded large media files (MP3, .mov) to another server on the Internet. Now they want to get those same files into their Plone site. Rather than requiring them to upload from their local computer, it would be nice to provide a feature to fetch the file from a remote URL.

Remote uploads of multimedia content is issue #79 in the Plone4Artists tracker.