On his blog today Michael Kimsal asks a question that hasn't come up much in recent months - with all of the advancements browsers are adding in, why aren't there better hooks for measuring file downloads?

This current tirade stems from implementing a file upload progress meter in PHP5. Yes, PHP5.2 has some hook, and there's a PECL extension. [...] I realize this is partially a PHP issue I'm ranting about, but it's ultimately a hacky workaround to a basic piece of functionality that browsers should support.

He mentions an example where he basically directly asked a member of the IE team about it. It wasn't greeted seriously and still hasn't managed to be included in most of the popular browsers of today.

In a continuation of their series looking at what's new in PHP5, the IBM developerWorks site has posted part five, a look at the handy addition of the file upload progress functionality.

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.

In a new post to his blog, Pádraic Brady gives an update on the status of his proposal for the Zend_Service_Yadis package:

Back in late February, I submitted a proposal to the Zend Framework wiki to see if Zend_Service_Yadis could be added as part of an overall objective to natively support OpenID (and related technologies) within the framework. Yadis is a suitable standalone service since it's not OpenID specific and is therefore useful for a number of other purposes. That proposal has seen a few revisions since the initial draft so I'm hoping that by the time Zend Framework 1.0 is released it's in good enough shape to allow for a comprehensive review and critique.

As far at the current status, he mentions the revisions it's gone through so far and how it's progressing towards "completion" (an Alpha state). He also points out that the component will not support using Internationalised Resource Indicators (IRIs), however "support for XRIs will be supported, but may not initially be concrete".

With the release of PHP 5.2 and a new feature, the file upload hooks useful for making an upload progress meter, PHP 4 users have been feeling a little left out. Well, come into the light PHP4ers - PHPClasses has just what you need - two patches to give you the same functionality.

Since I wanted to use this upload progress meter extension under PHP 4, I had to find an alternative solution. I decided to port the patch that adds hooks to monitor upload progress to make it run under PHP 4.

These two patches work for different versions:

• PHP 4.3.11
• PHP 4.4.4

He also links to a few other resources of use to file uploaders out there:

• an example of a plugin using COMET to generate the progress bar
• the upload progress meter for the PHP 5 series
• and a Windows version of the same.

In a new post to the JSLabs blog today, there's a mini-tutorial showing how to, with the help of the new hooks in PHP 5.2, create a file upload progress meter.

This progess meter is based on the yahoo user interface library and alternative php cache (APC). You will need both of these for it to display properly. PHP 5.2.0 or higher is also required. (I have written a previous article on alternative PHP cache here).

He gives a brief overview of how things work (including the php.ini setting to make it happen) and has a screenshot of the resulting output. You can check out the demo here or just grab the source and jump right in.

According to this note from Christian Stocker on the BitFlux blog, the upload progress meter (using the new file upload hooks introduced in recent PHP versions) has finally been included, officially, into PECL.

After some tweaking, code improvements and remote code execution vulnerability fixes, I finally put the uploadprogress extension into PECL.

Windows users might be out of luck for a while though, since Christian's not pursuing binaries for the package. However, the source is there, and anyone is more than welcome to try...

On the BitFlux blog today, Christian Stocker talks about the patch for PHP that allows for a simple progress meter when files are uploading.

Showing a real progress bar when uploading large files is an often requested (and quite informative) feature, which is not easily doable with the way the upload handling works in PHP. There is a patch available for PHP 4.4 and 5.0, which made it nevertheless possible, but some php core files itself needed to be patched for that.

He notes, however, that a new sort of patch for the same thing has just been committed to the PHP_5_2 branch, making the previous patch a thing of the past. It's completely new and you can check out the code here or the svnweb here.

PHPBuilder.com has another excerpt from the book PHP 5 in Practice showing quickly this time how to create a dyanmic progress bar for your application.

In some situations you might need to display a progress bar-for example, when you are performing many tasks on the back end and they take a while to complete. In these cases it is a good idea to give some indication to the user that you are in fact still performing tasks and that their browser hasn't simply locked up.

They demonstrate a few different ways to accomplih this task including a simple "Please wait" kind of message and a more PHP-based example that changes the width of a DIV based on the amount of time it's taken to perform the task.

Joshua Eichorn has posted about some updates that he's made to his "file upload progress meter" example in the wake of major popularity via del.icio.us and digg.

Over the weekend my file upload progress meter code got lots of traffic. It seems it made it made it on the del.icio.us popular list as well as getting over a thousands diggs. To celebrate this i've updated the code.

The main new feature is giving you feedback without having to patch PHP. Now the patched version gives you more information such as upload speed and estimated time to completion. But we still provide some nice user feedback even without it now.

I also created some wiki pages to start the documentation process.

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