Given that uploading huge files can be tedious for impatient users, it is important to provide them positive feedback to keep them from giving up and going away.

Fortunately, PHP V5.2's new hooks into the file upload process allow us to show users in real time what is happening with their uploads. In this article, we will create a progress bar using PHP V5.2 for our users (see Download for source code).

They talk about what "hooks" are to explain how things work together before getting into the setup of the sample app. They chose to go with WAMP for their examples, but it can be easily adapted to any other flavor of *AMP setup of your choosing.

They set up a default upload box inside of a normal form the user can upload a file with. The real magic happens on the backend when the "Upload" button is hit. Via a handy call to the apc_fetch function, we can determine how far along the file is in the upload. This is relayed back to the script when their "Start me up!" link is clicked and a progress bar is advanced as the file is uploaded.

PhpSecInfo v0.2.1 is now available. It's primarily a bugfix release, but a fairly significant one.

Updates include:

• uid and gid tests now correctly test the user and group that PHP is executing as
• Changed upload_max_filesize and post_max_size return '�OK'� if current value is equal to recommended value
• fixed nonstandard naming on some constants
• fixed XHTML validation issue

As mentioned, the issue with the uploadprogress extension has been fixed and as been introduced into the PECL repository. The other post just mentions what the patch is doing to try to keep compatibility problems from happening due to back extensions and/or modules being loaded in an application.

More details about the Suhosin patch can be found here.