Question

I have often wonder how Facebook is able to handle uploading multiple files on the server when I am uploading my pictures.

I am quite not sure how it is being implemented. As I know, you could only send one file to the server through http one at a time unless you are going to make use of Applets.

Does anybody know how Facebook implements this? Is this Flash or an applet or something?

Answer 1

There’s nothing special that you need to do on your web page – multiple <input type="file"> elements in the same <form> will upload multiple files at once.

The tricky part is handling all those files on the server. Take a look at a library such as Apache Commons FileUpload

Edit

You might want to take a look at this thread – people have suggested quite a few readily available components that you can use (note that these are for the client-side i.e. in the browser. You still need to handle the uploaded files on the server using something like the FileUpload library I mentioned before)