Going back to Java applets for upload

2012-01-25 Computing applet · browser · java · uploading

This is something that I didn’t think that I would be writing in 2012 – we are switching to a Java based applet for our uploader.

The problem has been that browsers and their operating systems handle uploads differently. Really differently. Evening using a project like plupload, you can’t polyfill over the cracks. There are new APIs coming out (if you want to call it HTML5, not strictly true though), but to handle backwards compatibility, including IE9, there needs to be a mechanism to make it generic and the only thing is Java.

Flash can be ok, but there are limitations in filesize,
Javascript depends on the browser implementation.
Gears & Silverlight – not exactly something that I want to deploy.
Java – the cross platform way.
Depending on the browsers built in widgets – Not possible for large files.

We need to transfer large files of over 2Gb, and some browsers will actually try and load the entire file into memory before transferring. Certain death of the browser on old machines.

Java gives us chunking, it gives us a cross platform implementation, it gives us a easy testing mechanism. 2012 – roll out your applets.