Direct Multipart Uploads to S3 in Rails | Hacker News Reader

Direct Multipart Uploads to S3 in Rails

blog.bitcast.io

30 pointsmgillett10 comments

I've tried looking for something exactly like this before to no avail. Really awesome assuming it can deliver!

That said, being more transparent in the Readme on Github about the browsers that are currently supported and that plan to be supported would be appreciated. Blob is only Chrome 21+, Firefox 13+ and IE 10+ according to MDN (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/DOM/Blob), and judging by the "FileBlob API is not supported" comment under the TODO section, there isn't any backwards compatibility yet. How far back are you planning on supporting?

Really glad you find it useful, and you're completely right that I need a section on compatibility. The nice thing is that for browsers that don't support Blobs, Amazon allows you to just upload the file as one giant chunk with the same multipart API. I'm not absolutely sure yet (I still need to do some testing), but this should mean that browsers versions as far back as IE 5 will work - only basic XHR compatibility will be required to function. I'm planning on covering as many browsers as possible, I just haven't found a great way to go about this yet. Is there a better option than http://spoon.net/browsers/?

I would also look at http://testling.com/ and https://saucelabs.com/. Not sure which is best for this kind of testing, but those are two more I'm aware of.

This looks like a very useful gem, I wish I found it a week ago!

I ended up using filepicker.io, and am quite happy with that now. But this gem could be good for people that don't want to rely on a third-party (although I still recommend trying filepicker.io)

I'm sure this is more a question about S3 than the gem itself, but can you provide any info about security risks, who can upload, where they can upload to, etc.? e.g.: what's to stop someone from uploading a ton of files to your bucket if they have direct access to it?

I'm not sure with this library, but with other solutions you have a handshake endpoint on your server which creates a time-limited, single use token. The browser hits your server which then creates a key on S3 and sends it back to the client. The client can then use said key to upload on S3. Might be good to use SSL along with this.

Congratulations on this gem. This is a need that was not filled. I had thought about this, but our requirements changed.

BTW, the text does not scale up. And anyone have the name of the website that reformats a page with good CSS, just for future reference.

We will get the text fixed, thanks!

Readability?

Readability seems to require a login and an account, etc. There is one that you can just paste the URL and it displays it with different CSS and formatting. I should have bookmarked it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com