On Developer.com today there's a new tutorial that looks at working with file uploads in Zend Framework applications and looking more specifically at the Zend_File_Transfer component.

Chances are you've become well acquainted with the Web-based mechanism used to upload files to the Web. But how does this mechanism actually work? What process results in the file being transferred from your computer to the remote server? In this tutorial I'll show you how to create your own file upload mechanism using the popular Zend Framework, which makes accepting, validating, and processing uploaded files a walk in the park.

They look at creating a simple upload form and how to tie a Zend_File_Transfer instance to the backend of it to make uploading and validating the files a simple process. You can find out more information on the component here and another related component, Zend_ProgressBar, here.

Thomas Weidner has posted about a method he's come up with to help protect you and your site when uploading files through the Zend_File_Transfer component from the Zend Framework.

The new Zend_File_Transfer component is growing day for day. As incredible new feature this component allows to use file validators. These are necessary to increase security and allow to define rules for file uploads (and also downloads in future).

He illustrates with a simple Zend_File_Transfer object that uses an addValidators call to limit the size of the upload to 50 KB. Other validation rules include count (the number of files to expect), extension, filessize and imagesize. Using these he makes a "more secure" upload object setting the size to 205KB, to expect five files that are all under 1MB and are of the types gif/jpg/png.