Resumable Large File Upload With Perl.
Thin Slice Upload is a resumable file uploader capable of transporting files containing gigabytes over data over HTTP. On our website, the emphasis is most on on using the applet with PHP as the server side technology, it can be used just as easily with other technologies such as Perl or JSP. The new release aims to improve ease of use with perl.
Thin Slice Upload is popular among PHP users because default installations of PHP can only handle uploads of upto 2MB. Thin Slice Upload bypasses the limits imposed through the php.ini file to upload very large files. Though perl users are unlikely to be hampered by such arbitrarily limits, webserver or proxy server settings may effect their ability to process a large upload with an HTML form. Thin Slice Upload can be used in such a situation for successful large file uploads with perl.
So how does Thin Slice Upload work? To answer that we first need to answer the question “how does an HTML form based file upload work?” It works by combining all the files together into a single entity known as a ‘multipart message’. A connection is made to the web server and this multipart message is posted to the webserver where it’s decoded and the files are separated. Thin Slice Upload does the exact opposite, instead of combining the files into a single post, it makes multiple posts with each post containing a fragment of a file.
At the server side a script gathers the fragments posted to it by the server and reassembles the files. The downloadable package includes both a perl script and a PHP script. In this new version we have made several improvements to the perl script to make installation easier and to make the process more stable.
