Flash uploading (still) sucks at The Chronicles of Stuffed Guys

The new version of WordPress as you might already know features a fancy new file uploader. It actually uses a hidden Flash movie to allow you to choose multiple files at once for uploading and displays a progress of uploading.

The thing is — it doesn’t really work.

There are numerous reports of people for whom the new uploader just hangs forever in a so called “Crunching” final state. I’ve tried it on two different computers with two different browsers and it didn’t work for me ANYWHERE. The files were actually uploaded on the server, but the uploader didn’t seem to understand that this actually happened.

The progress of uploading doesn’t show what’s really going on. Usually it quickly gets to 100% and then hangs there for a long time. As I understand this happens because as far as Flash is concerned it has already sent all the bytes of the file to the network (so it shows 100% completion), but it has no clue if all of the bytes actually arrived to the receiving party or not.
We wanted (as WordPress also does) to communicate with the Flash-based uploader in the page in order to do some stuff when the upload was finished, but this seemed to be buggy as hell, sometimes this worked, sometimes not, this also depended on the machine where we tried, the browser, the exact Flash version — a complete nightmare.

Unfortunately, as the latest version of WordPress shows, Flash-based uploading is still not ready for production server/software use. Which is a pitty, it could have been a great addition to the Web experience.

2 Responses to “Flash uploading (still) sucks”

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1 Aaron
April 24, 2008 at 6:24 am

Yes, it’s a pity there is still no reliable, friendly way to make large file uploads work on the web. Our customers need to upload large files (50MB+) and in many places of the world this is extremely difficult to do reliably - many of them just cut out halfway. Not to mention that they can’t tell whether it’s still working, how much is done, how long there is to wait…
Normally I don’t like Flash as a general part of sites, but if it could fix the extremely basic and unfriendly upload in browsers I would certainly use it.

I think that security hamstrings flash a bit. They don’t want to expose anything risky - which lets face it, would be immediately abused by the scammers of the world - but this makes it difficult to do what is required.

Basically I think the browsers need to fix this. File upload should be a first class citizen in the web experience, not a tacked-on hack in form submission.
2 sarman
April 28, 2008 at 7:51 pm

Hello! Today i trying a factory and i like it=) I am a php/mysql developer, get a trial for our company. It work very soft, like an good engine in car, thanks, we will kep tryin. Upload big files was a problem early for me, but we (as developers in general) get another problem - compatibility. Early i use a simple cgi-bin perl script with ajax callback to show nice upload progress bar, easy for programmer-admin, but it was harder to install a product for a medium or small-size customer. Customers is all for that model of sales. Not so smart admins is a problem too=) So, latest php builds have an internal support of ajax callbacks and client may see how much time left when file is uploading. But it is a compatibility problem. So funny circle in that type of product. Good luck, guys, from Russia!

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