Question

Other than HTTP PUT and POST, what other methods can a web application designer use to allow users to upload content (either files or listbox text) from a page of his web app to a remote server?

On the same topic, I was wondering what technology/APIs does a service like Google Docs or Google Drive use? The reason I ask this is: Our Sys Admin has disabled file uploading (via Squid proxy), yet I was able to create and share a document using Google Docs / Google Drive.

Many thanks in advance,

/HS

EDIT Please see the strikeout above.

Answer 1

This depends on the server in question – as the standard set of HTTP commands can be expanded, and some may not be configured/allowed. One of the common commands is “OPTIONS” that ask “what can I do”.

But to answer more helpfully: you generally have two main options:

• POST (the one you probably want to user as it’s nearly always avaiable
• GET. You could use GET (but I’m NOT advocating it – just saying you could you it – you should not use a GET to make changes to the server). There are problems with this approach (including size of files, manually handling the encoding etc) but it’s possible if you have to go this route.

PUT it often not enabled on servers for security reasons.

More reading: http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec9.html

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Edit: if “file uploading” is prevented by proxy, have you tried encoding the POST? i.e. As opposed to sending a multipart POST, try encoding the files yourself into POST string and sending that instead? Or encode the file and split into multiple small posts and piecing them together at the other end?

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Google Docs uses a mixture of POST and GET. POST for the updates. Google Drive I don’t know.