In a new tutorial today from PHPMaster.com, they show you how to combine Javascript and a PHP feature to track the progress of an upload to your web application.

A problem that has plagued web developers for years is how to add real-time information to their applications, such as a progress bar for file uploads. [...] JavaScript can access a file's name, type, and even the width and height of a local image, but it wasn't until HTML5 that it could access a file's size. [...] In this article I'll show you how [the session.upload_progress] feature can be used to create a simple upload progress bar without any external libraries or browser dependencies.

The tutorial provides all the steps you'll need to get it working - defining the form with the extra required field, styling it and plugging the Javascript in to call a small script to get the progress of the upload. It returns the difference between the content-length of the file and the current size (as a percentage of 100).

On CodeIgniter.com there's a new post updating the community on more of the current happenings surrounding the project including the status of their move to github and another source for developers to find the CI help they need.

In less than two weeks since the announcement was made at CICON that CodeIgniter was moving to GitHub, we've seen some incredible results from the change. Already CodeIgniter is the 10th most watched PHP project at GitHub (currently 758), with 42 open pull requests, 53 merged pull requests, 170 forks, and 41 individual contributors. Incredible!

[...] We also noticed what seemed to be a spike in activity on the #CodeIgniter Freenode IRC channel, so we've decided to make it more prominent to encourage its continued use. You'll now notice an IRC tab in the main navigation, letting you access the #CodeIgniter IRC channel right here at CodeIgniter.com.

If you want more details on why they made the switch over to git, check out this blog entry from the EllisLab site for an explanation from Derek Jones

On DZone.com today Giorgio Sironi has posted the results of a poll taken a little while back concerning what people thought was the best feature of the upcoming PHP 5.4 release.

After two weeks, we have closed the poll among the PHP community of Web Builder Zone to establish which are the most wanted features, which will influence development of applications on PHP 5.4. Hopefully this poll would also shape our focus in tutorials in the future - I personally plan to dedicate more time to the winning features.

Runners up included the removal of magic quotes and strict mode with the top three being (in this order) the upload progress patch, traits and the array improvements leading the pack. You can see the results here.

Brian Swan (of Microsoft) has posted his wrapup of the recent Jump In! Camp they held around integration of SQL Server functionality into several popular PHP projects like the Zend Framework and PEAR.

During each day of the camp, PHP developers worked side-by-side with Microsoft developers to add SQL Server and SQL Azure support to their projects, but nearly everyone put in many extra hours late at night (and even early morning!) to add support for other Microsoft technologies (such as IIS, Web Platform Installer, and Windows Azure).

He includes some pictures taken of the progress board for the various projects and the wishlist that developers in attendance requested of the Microsoft team.

I can't say thanks enough to all the participants for being 100% invested in the camp and for going the extra mile to investigate how their projects might be able to integrate Microsoft technologies beyond SQL Server and SQL Azure. I know that the entire SQL Server team echoes my thanks.

Johannes Schluter has a new post to his blog looking at the progress that the upload progress meter extension has been making and how a version of it, put together by Arnaud Le Blanc has been introduced to the trunk line of PHP's code.

For implementing this we have one architectural problem: PHP implements, for very good reasons, a shared nothing architecture. So one request from connection has no insight into another request/connection - but this is needed for the upload progress. [...] The obvious solution, of course, would be to use PHP's session handling system for this. [...] Now there were some technical issues why this wasn't done at first ... but then Arnaud Le Blanc sat down and created a proper implementation of an upload progress storage handler which has been commit to PHP trunk. Long story short: In the next version of PHP (5.4?) you will, most likely, have an Upload Progress mechanism built-in.

If you want all of the details on it, you can check out the RFC on it. Johannes shows a sample of the settings and code that, once the next release of PHP comes out, you can use to enable the extension and be able to poll the session for the progress details.

On the Liip blog today Christian Stocker has posted about a few common issues developers seem to have with the upload progress meter extension and a few answers to help them out.

After I released uploadprogress 1.0.0 some days ago and finally declared it as stable, it's time to write that blogpost about some of the limitations and caveats one has to know.

The post links to a demo and answers a few different questions on issues such as:

• Running it on other modules than mod_php on Apache ( like fastcgi)
• Checking if files are too big
• The position and content of UPLOAD_IDENTIFIER within the form is important
• Why not use $_SESSION for the info?
• It segfaults, when I don't include UPLOAD_IDENTIFIER

See the PECL page for the extension for more information.

Christian Stocker has posted about "the next take" on the PHP upload progress meter extension - a new version that plays a bit nicer on Windows than before.

The uploadprogress extension for PHP never really worked on Windows and since I don't have a Windows development environment I could never do a proper analysis of the problem. Until this week, when Tomas Holusa sent me an email telling me about some VCWD_RENAME problems on Windows.

A patch that was submitted a while back confirmed the issue and a new patch was written and submitted to take care of the problem. You can try out the new extension on Windows with either the normal Wind32 build or Win32 nts build.

Christian Stocker has released the latest version of the uploadprogress extension to the PECL repository (0.9.2). The package allows the code to track the progress of an upload automatically.

The main new function since 0.9.1 is uploadprogress_get_contents($id), which allows you to analyse the content of an uploading file during the upload and do appropriate measure (for example warn the user, that he doesn't upload a supported video format). You have to enable this feature in php.ini to make it work. This feature was provided by Ben Ramsey, so you have to poke him, if something's wrong with it.

A simple example of it in action is also included (in the /examples subdirectory off of the PECL page) showing how to upload a file, get the progress and - most importantly - how to get useful error messages out of it.

On his blog today Michael Kimsal asks a question that hasn't come up much in recent months - with all of the advancements browsers are adding in, why aren't there better hooks for measuring file downloads?

This current tirade stems from implementing a file upload progress meter in PHP5. Yes, PHP5.2 has some hook, and there's a PECL extension. [...] I realize this is partially a PHP issue I'm ranting about, but it's ultimately a hacky workaround to a basic piece of functionality that browsers should support.

He mentions an example where he basically directly asked a member of the IE team about it. It wasn't greeted seriously and still hasn't managed to be included in most of the popular browsers of today.

In a continuation of their series looking at what's new in PHP5, the IBM developerWorks site has posted part five, a look at the handy addition of the file upload progress functionality.

Given that uploading huge files can be tedious for impatient users, it is important to provide them positive feedback to keep them from giving up and going away.

Fortunately, PHP V5.2's new hooks into the file upload process allow us to show users in real time what is happening with their uploads. In this article, we will create a progress bar using PHP V5.2 for our users (see Download for source code).

They talk about what "hooks" are to explain how things work together before getting into the setup of the sample app. They chose to go with WAMP for their examples, but it can be easily adapted to any other flavor of *AMP setup of your choosing.

They set up a default upload box inside of a normal form the user can upload a file with. The real magic happens on the backend when the "Upload" button is hit. Via a handy call to the apc_fetch function, we can determine how far along the file is in the upload. This is relayed back to the script when their "Start me up!" link is clicked and a progress bar is advanced as the file is uploaded.