Pure javascript resumable file uploads launched at Minus

blog.minus.com

15 points·carlhu··6 comments

Note: We got resumeable uploads working for Chrome and Firefox only. Internet Explorer and Safari still fall back to flash and non-resumeable uploads (respectively).

If you use Chrome or Firefox, you can now drop a file onto a page on minus.com, unplug your network, reconnect, and your file resumes uploading where you left off.

I love the web and am excited to see the range of possibilities for pure-browser features expand.

Are you using HTML5 File API with JavaScript? Great to see an image hosting site continue to innovate!

We are, indeed, using only the HTML5 File API and javascript for this feature.

Can you provide a little more detail on how it's implemented?

Are you using resumable.js[1] or is it a custom implementation?

[1] https://github.com/23/resumable.js

Sure, let me give some further implementation detail.

We were inspired by https://github.com/dmitry-dedukhin/lightweight-uploader, particularly the js implementation from Dmitry.

It turned out, however, that the simple flow control he implemented was not adaptive enough to simultaneously accommodate both low-latency/low bandwidth and high-latency/high-bandwidth connection.

For resumeable uploads to work efficiently for both cases, we implemented TCP/IP-style congestion control (e.g. slow start window size scaling and exponential back-off retry timeout), but over http POST requests instead of UDP packet sends.

Amazing! I thought it's a desktop tool only feature. Really nice to see this feature finally available on web. I'm wondering why it's available on Chrome and FireFox only. How about IE9?

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