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.


PloneJUpload problems

Posted by Tom at Jan 24, 2006 07:07 AM
I have PloneJUpload in use and observed the following problems:

 * filenames containing some important special characters are skipped and not uploaded by the applet

 * at least in our environment the progressbar rapidly climbs to 100% but then you have to wait for the upload to be executed effectivly - so progressbar does not really reflect progress of upload

Please report these issues to the tracker

Posted by Nate Aune at Jan 24, 2006 07:16 AM
I don't think the JUpload applet has support for unicode, but you might want to check with the JUpload folks to confirm that.

I have also observed that the progress bar doesn't behave as expected.

Can you please report both of these issues to the PloneJUpload tracker? That way, they are a logged in a sensible place and can be dealt with most effectively? http://plone.org/products/plonejupload/issues

thanks,
Nate

Not enough rights to add to tracker?

Posted by Tom at Jan 24, 2006 07:32 AM
I wanted to do that. Unfortunately I am not able to. Maybe it's just too early in the morning for me or I am missing the right to add to the tracker. ;-)

Try now

Posted by Nate Aune at Jan 25, 2006 06:57 PM
Sorry, I forgot to change the workflow 'open for new submissions'. you should now be able to add new issues to the tracker. -Nate

WebDAV + Resource Fork

Posted by Justin Ryan at Jan 25, 2006 03:20 PM
ATFile ought to store Resource Forks, since this is a feature available on many platforms, and some files - Adobe .psd especially - don't like it if you discard the rfork.

I suspect that a major problem is OSX's DAV behaviour is not standard, but I suspect Plone / Zope can behave differently for different DAV clients, the same as it does for IE and various browsers that need special treatment.