We are pleased to announce the release of Thin Slice Upload V2 (Beta). Thin Slice Upload is a resumable file unloader capable of transporting files containing gigabytes over data over HTTP. When large files are being transferred it is not unusual for it to be interrupted due to network or IO errors. Thin Slice Upload has always been able to resume such interrupted uploads from where it left off. The new version of the applet will automatically retry the transfer should that happen.

How many times an interrupted upload can be retried is something for you to decide. You can also make the applet wait a certain number of seconds before each retry. Another improvement in the new version is ease of configuration. While the thinupload.properties file from previous versions has been preserved, you can configure the applet by directly embedding parameters into the HTML of the web page that holds it as well.

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, web server 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 download able package includes both a perl script and a PHP script. Server side handlers in built with other technologies are also available.