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- The "Sean Treadway method" Requires fcgid and Apache. Pretty much superseded by...
- Mongrel's upload progress extension. Your upload form launches an AJAX updater that says "How far thru' the file am I, foo'?" every N seconds. However, because your upstream bandwidth is hosed (especially on 128Kbps DSL), it tends to take N+15 seconds to get a response. Can be notoriously hard to make go. (Hint, try sudo gem cleanup, and not running your code as root, or not being on a VPN to the server. Any combination of these might have helped.)
- Mongrel tends to be run behind a load balancing proxy. These sometimes buffer requests so you end up sending 100% of the file before the server knows a file is coming. A solution appears to be to run another Mongrel instance on another port to accept uploads. This is a solution that lots of people suggest but no-one actually says "I do this, here's how".
- Apache users might need to use mod_proxy_html to rewrite your links, if your JS doesn't have URLs generated with Rails' url_to helpers. This may or may not exist for Apache 2.2.
- I have everything working up to this point, but the progress doesn't actually display for me using Apache 2.2 as my load balancer.
- There is a Mongrel Upload Progress with Streaming extention, based on XUpload. The author sounds like he's been working on making it use JSON rather than Javascript, but there's not been a release since. May or may not work with Safari.
- Use lighttpd and it's upload progress engine. I presume you'd just use it to proxy Mongrel. (Not really for me, as I'm somewhat tied to Apache on my SSL port.)
- Merb, which seems to be Ruby off Rails. Again, it is used as a secondary server that just accepts uploads, but I have no idea how you'd run a merb and hand uploads to your Rails application. Comments to this welcome.
ShockwaveMacromediaAdobe Flash, which does all the upload progress client-side. There's a nice degrades-to-Javascript engine called SWFUpload to try here.
Confused yet?
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I've been using mongrel_upload_progress for 8 months or so now on one of my apps. I run pound -> pack of mongrels (nginx wasn't as popular then).
Pound doesn't buffer requests, so any of the mongrels can handle the upload and upload progress pings. I use the DRb backend to coordinate between Mongrels.
I run Apache on the server that I want to run the application on, hosting other sites on the SSL port, so ultimately I need to continue using Apache myself.
Thanks for your comment though - good to know.
[...] my previous post on upload progress in Rails, I can now [...]
Great list, thanks!
The Sean Treadway method is apparently the only one in this list I can use on my host server (Site5), as they are using FastCGI.
Major problem there is it extends the deprecated form_tag, which will break in Rails 2.0, I believe. Any suggestions on how to use with form_for?
[...] are a ton of possible upload progress solutions for Web applications that need them. I had been using the upload progress that came with Merb, but [...]
For the last bullet point, check out ActiveUpload.
(however, swfupload has moved to http://www.swfupload.org)