Thin File Putter Released.
Thin File Putter 1.00 has been released. As the name suggest this is a file uploader that make use of the HTTP Put method to upload files on to your server. You may well ask what is HTTP Put? It’s a counterpart of the more commonly used GET and POST methods of the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol.
The GET Method is traditionally used to retrieve web pages from a server. The POST method is used to send data to a server, such as when filling out forms on a website. Another use for the method is the so called form based file uploads. Thin Upload, Thin Image Upload etc also make use of the POST method to upload files.
Unlike the POST method the PUT method is tailor made for handling files. One of the major advantages is that with most programming languages the files can be written to disk while the data is being streamed. This is in stark contrast to a POST where the files data cannot be read until all the data has been received.
With a POST the encoding of the data has to be reversed, Once the decoding of the post data has been completed the files usually need to be moved from temporary storage to a more permanent location. If the move operation is across partitions this could double the disk IO. Both issues can be averted with PUT.
I must plead an amount of ignorance here. What benefits does Thin File Putter give over Apache Commons File Upload? Keeping in mind that the Apache lib is free for a start?
Copying a whole directory with hundreds or thousands of files is something I would never do from a web front end. There’s too much to go wrong.
Comment by Jason Bell — October 12, 2005 @ 8:32 pm
Thank you jason for asking. The whole purpose of Thin File Family of products is to overcome whatever issues that you may face with a simple browser based upload.
As for the Commons File Upload library. It’s a server side file upload parser. Designed to decode incoming file uploads. It is true that there is a separate Commons HTTP client that can make a post as well but it’s not a complete client. In other words you have to build an applet with it to make use of it. The disadvantage of is that the Commons HTTP client is multipurpose so the resultant applet will be rather large.
Last but not least you simply cannot make a PUT method file upload with the browser along.
Comment by Thin File Team — October 12, 2005 @ 8:47 pm
Can the Thin File Putter be implemented on TomCat? or can it be implemeted to work with Java? We are getting away from cgi and php.
Thanks.
Comment by CatherineChan — February 23, 2006 @ 5:10 am