this is quite a difficult topic by all accounts. I am building a website that requires users to upload large (multi-GB). What is the best way allow users to upload a file on a website and allow the file upload to be resumed should it fail? What is the way to write this in rails?
Any ideas greatly appreciated.
Max.
No browsers support resuming uploads.
From my Googling, Flash doesn't seem to, either.
Though I don't know enough about Java to say it's impossible, there don't seem to be any pre-rolled upload solutions that support this method.
In short, you would have to code your own out-of-browser/plugin solution. If that is not feasible, you may have to abandon this feature. Sorry!
EDIT: Actually, after using a better search query, here's a Java solution that seems to support this through partitioning the initial file: JumpLoader. Here is the documentation page for resuming downloads. Best of luck! (You will note that there are purchase links - this is only for an unbranded version, and for the source code. You can use the JumpLoader branded version for free.)
No browser support this, In fact this cannot be done over HTTP.
You will have to write your own java applet, ActiveX control or WPF browser application to achieve this. Any of this will speak to a TCP server listening on the server side to achieve pause-and-resume upload of file.
Six years since you asked, but for future viewers, take a look at ResumableJS. It uses HTML5 File API to break uploads into chunks. They also include a RoR example for accepting the upload.
Related
I've been scouring the SO board and google and can't find any really good recommendations for this. I'm building a Twilio application and the text-to-speech (TTS) engine is way bad. Plus, it's a pain in the ass to test since I have to deploy every time. Is there a significantly better resource out there that could render to a WAV or MP3 file so I can save and use that instead? Maybe there's a great API for this somewhere. I just want to avoid recording 200 MP3 files myself, would rather have this generated programatically...
Things I've seen and rejected:
http://www.yakitome.com/ (I couldn't force myself to give them my email)
http://www2.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php
http://www.naturalreaders.com/index.htm
http://www.panopreter.com/index.php (on the basis of crappy website)
Thinking of paying for this, but not sure yet: https://ondemand.neospeech.com/
Obviously I'm new to this, if I'm missing something obvious, please point it out...
I am not sure if you have access to a mac computer or not. Mac has pretty advanced tts built into the operating system. Apple spent a lot of money on top engineers to research it. It can easily be controlled and even automated from the command prompt. It also has quite a few built in voices to choose from. That is what I used on a recent phone system I put up. But I realize that this is not an option if you don't have a mac.
Another one you might want to check into is http://cepstral.com/ they have very realistic voices. I think they used to be open source but they are no longer and now you need to pay licensing fees. They are very commonly used for high end commercial applications. And are not so much geared towards the home user that wants their article read to them.
I like the YAKiToMe! website the best. It's free and the voices are top quality. In case you're still worried about giving them your email, they've never spammed me in many years of use and I never got onto any spam lists after signing up with them, so I doubt they sold my email. Anyway, the service is great and has lots of features for turning electronic text into audio files in different languages.
As for the API you're looking for, YAKiToMe! has a well-documented API and it's free to use. You have to register with the site to use it, but that's because it lets you customize pronunciation and voice selection, so it needs to differentiate you from other users.
I need to make an if statement using Ruby that checks to see if the client's browser support HTML5 or not.
Short version: you won't be able to, nor should you.
Long version: It may be possible, if you do some user-agent sniffing, to identify whether or not the user's browser supports HTML5 or not. But this would take a fair amount of effort to get right. The better solution is to use something like Modernizr (http://www.modernizr.com/) to do your feature detection on the client-side.
It's possible to read the browser info based on the HTTP_USER_AGENT string, but, as mentioned above and many other places, it's also really easy to spoof that info. On the server-side we only cared because it gave us an overall view of the client browsers being used to access our sites.
Trying to react to a browser on the backend and present different content was tried by sites for a while, but it fails because of how browsers spoof other browsers, but don't have the same bugs.
As #Stephen Orr said, CSS is a better way of dealing with it. Sure it's hell and still error-prone, but it's better than sniffing the browser's signature. We used to cuss every release of IE because it broke the previous fixes. Luckily things seem to be getting better as the vendors creep toward toeing standards.
Most features can be detected (with JavaScript), but some kinds like the form-date-feature field is a problem: http://united-coders.com/matthias-reuter/user-agent-sniffing-is-back
It is possible to do Feature detection on HTML5, to detect single features from HTML5 as you need them. There is, however, no way to detect if a browser supports HTML5 as one big chunk - as there is no "official" way to tell if a browser supports all of HTML5 or just parts of it.
< [html5 element] id="somethingtobedazzledby">
Upgrade your browser
</ [html5 element] >
First of all, I'm not a hacker :)
We're doing a project where we'll award points to users for visiting certain groups of sites.
Obviously there are major privacy concerns, but we have no interest in actually knowing where they've been, just as long as the program we create can check the history and through an algorithm, rank the site/user.
This would be a downloadable application and we'd tell the user how it worked, since transparency is vital.
Now, with that in mind, is there a way for a local program to access the Cache/History of a browser and make a list out of it?
I've read that Firefox uses SQLite to compile their History, which could potentially be parsed using Adobe AIR.
At the same time, Adobe AIR has access to the filesystem, so it could probably check if the usual IE temporary folders have any files stored. If so, try to read the URL they were downloaded from?
I know all of this sounds very dodgy, but try to keep an open mind :)
Thank you all for your help.
Not a full answer to your question, but you might be interested in the CSS History hack. If you already KNOW the sites you want to rank, you will be able to find out which sites the users visited.
Good thing you said something about a LOCAL program, because there are surely ways to read out the SQLite database from Mozilla and IE's history and you can find plenty of implementations using your favorite search engine.
Particularly easy to use are Nirsoft's utilities MozillaHistoryView and IEHistoryView which you could script to output CSV and parse that file afterwards.
I've been googling about how to accomplish oneline chat for rails application and I've implemented a text chat version using Juggernaut. But for video chat, I only find flash&red5 might be a solution for me, but it's flash and java, which I'm relatively not good at. Is there a better solution?
I have researched this a little and the options are not great.
There are some nice-looking packages that cost real money. Tokbox.com, ooVoo (http://www.oovoo.com, looks free at first but free version has limits), VideoWhisper.com looks interesting -- they seem to sell a 2-way video chat package for a one-time fee, but it is PHP-based.
A simple Flash-based solution is definitely a good way to go. Flash has good video support and virtually everyone has it installed already. It's not that hard to learn enough Flash basics to do a simple 2-way video chat (see http://www.derekentringer.com/blog/fms-video-chat/ for an example of a trivial video chat script that is something like 30 lines of code). And you don't need to learn Java to use Red5 unless you want to customize it -- Red5 is the open-source video streaming server that makes it so you don't need to buy really a expensive Adobe Media Streaming server system. You just need to learn enough to set it up and get it running.
I'm certain there's an open-source or low-cost Flash script out there that handles a basic 2-way video chat, but I have yet to find it. If anyone does, please post it!
Here is a rails implementation of tokbox:
http://github.com/njacobeus/tokboxer/
Try using Raydash. There is a rails gem available at https://github.com/gersh/Raydash-Ruby-on-Rails. You just need to register at http://www.raydash.com to use it.
I'm currently learning rails by creating a simple project management app. I've gotten to the point where I would like to be allow a user upload multiple files - pdfs, docs, xls etc. The user only needs to be able to attach one file at a time, but the possibilty to have multiple documents associated with a project is a must.
I've spent quite a lot of time researching my options, and it appears the two main plugins are attachment_fu and paperclip. From what I've read though, these appear to concentrate specifically on the upload and subsequent resizing of images, something I couldn't care less about. Is there a simpler way to achieve what I'm trying?
Thank you all in advance.
You might still consider using attachment_fu or paperclip as those are the "standard" libraries for such tasks. And they work fine for any kind of file.
The multi-upload can't be made without JS or Flash now. You need add some hack in your view to manage it.