On the Zend Developer Zone today there's a new tutorial (by Jack Herrington) talking about working with Adobe AIR and Javascript to make a desktop application for uploading images (or any other files) to a remote server.

To solve the upload problem, most of the big services have dedicated upload applications that run on all the different platforms. But it takes a lot of work to develop them, especially when they have to run on both Macintosh and Windows. Or is it so tough? As it turns out, Adobe AIR technology makes it possible to write applications for any platform using just HTML and JavaScript. It also offers access to cool desktop features, notably drag and drop.

The tutorial shows how to make the application with the HTML/Javascript version of an AIR app (as opposed to Flex) that lets you drag and drop files into it to be uploaded. They make the basic file upload form first as a foundation then extend it to make it accept the remote request (via POST) from the AIR application to handle the uploads. Javascript code and screenshots are included.

Thanks to it being posted on reddit, the traffic to a certain post on Michael Kimsal's blog gave him a crash (literally?) course in high load management on a WordPress blog.

The blog post was voted up on reddit, and the server got slammed. So slammed, in fact, that it was unusable for a few hours while I investigated the problem. I didn't know the post was on reddit, but I knew I was getting some traffic.

He spent some time trying to get the Apache server to finally die off and give him back his machine, at least enough to get a feel for what was going on. Part of his problem was not having APC installed like he thought and the other part - WordPress. While friendly on the outside, it's apparently somewhat lacking on the inside.

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.

Rob Allen has revisited a Zend_Form example he had created before, updating it with a fix for a common error people were seeing when the form tries to validate.

I've been thinking about the Simple Zend_Form File Upload Example that I discussed last month. To recap, if you haven't read the comments, if the form fails to validate for some reason then you get a nasty error.

He corrects the issue by creating an ArrayObject (thanks to the SPL) that can be used both as an array and can look like a string to htmlspecialchars and changing up the validation a little bit to work with the new object.

In a recently posted tutorial on the Zend Developer Zone website, Cal Evans has pointed out a video showing PHP pushing videos out to YouTube.

Attention all you Zend Framework junkies, Jochen Hartmann has uploaded a new video to YouTube that demonstrates the basics of how to use Zend Framework with the YouTube Data API. This step-by-step demonstration walks you though everything you need to know to upload files to Youtube via Zend Framework.

The video (from the official Google developers) shows the creation of a simple application that uses the Google Data component of the Zend Framework to upload the selected video from their local machine.

You can find out more about the Google API for YouTube on this page on the Google Code website.

DevShed has posted the final part of their series looking at the handling of file uploads in PHP5. This last installment shows how to take what yuou've learned so far and make things a bit more modular.

At this stage, you've hopefully recalled how to build an expandable file uploading application with PHP 5 that uses only one custom function to transfer a target file from a client machine to a predefined web server. However, in the beginning, I said that I was going to teach you how to develop a brand new file uploading application using an object-oriented approach.

The finish off the FileUploader class they were working on previously and show some testing examples of it in action.

On DevShed today, there's a new article in their series looking at creating custom functions to handle file uploads in your application:

I'm going to show you how to wrap the file uploading application built in the previous article of the series into a single custom PHP function. This will turn it into a more maintainable and reusable piece of code.

They review the source built in previous parts of the series and show how to update it with a uploadFile() function that takes all of the logic from before (exceptions and all) and wraps it up into a nice little package that can be reused anywhere.

On DevShed today, they continue their look at uploading files in PHP with the addition of some error handling features for their current script.

In this third tutorial of the series, I'm going to show you how to incorporate a brand new error checking module into the file uploading PHP script created in the last article.

They show the basic method - uploading with no error checking - before showing how much help adding in an error checking component to watch for things like files that are too large, invalid file choices and problems writing the file on the server side.

DevShed has continued their series (here's part one) looking at the use of file uploading in your PHP scripts. They build on that foundation and add in some more useful features this time:

The initial script in the first tutorial of this series lacked some important features, such as the implementation of an effective error handling module and the ability to check the MIME type and size of the file being uploaded. In this second installment of the series, I'm going to improve the logic of the script from the first tutorial to provide it with the capacity to retrieve useful information concerning the entire file uploading process.

They look back at the previous tutorial to remind you of some of the concepts and then move on to show you how to get information about the file (like the MIME type, name and size of the uploaded file). The last page is just the full source code for the cut and pasters out there.

On DevShed today there's a new tutorial showing how to build file upload functionality into your scripts.

If you're a PHP developer who has built a certain number of web applications, then it's quite probable that you've already worked with HTTP file uploads. [...] First I'm going to teach you how to handle file uploads using a procedural approach, and then, with the topic well underway, by way of the object-oriented paradigm.

The introduce the beginners out there to the $_FILES array (a superglobal) that contains the details about the file(s) that have been submitted. Next comes the construction of a simple form and how to handle the submission on the PHP side.