We've had a lot of demand recently for a multiple-file upload tool. After looking at great utilities like the Flickr upload, I decided to try and recreate this using Flash. I have a lot of experience with upload tools, and you can only do a multiple file upload via Flash, Java, and most recently Silverlight.
I've done Java applets in the past, and they take a while to code and I haven't gotten very good at styling them. I can get them to have the same skin as the native OS, but most of the time you'd like to style some things according to your site's branding. I think Java applets are the most powerful, and if you need to do complex stuff, I think it's the way to go. But, for the demand that we were seeing, it was just a very simple upload tool. Nothing complex.
Silverlight is pretty new and I believe it uses C# (same as we use here), but I know that not a lot of people have that installed. I don't even think I have it installed on my computer. Possibly due to the Olympics using it to broadcast some of the coverage, but I know it's not very common on most people's computer.
Well, that leaves Flash. Not to say that's a bad thing. It's on virtually everyone's computer, and it getting more and more powerful with the recent addition of ActionScript 3. So, Flash it is.
There was really only one big bug with the whole process. In order for the Flash to fire the "complete" event saying that a file was completely uploaded, the server you're posting to must return back something. I believe it must be at least over zero bytes in length, but a simple returning of "true" will suffice.
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