ReleaseUploader

Interestingly, most documentation about http uploadfile talks about the server side - which is a bit more challenging compared to the client side. However, there is little about the client side script and the actual examples will only talk about uploading where the target server is ready to accept automated uploading of files.

It is a lot more complicated to find information how to download a html page that contains hidden values (!!!) in the form that must be sent back to the server to allow the target server fileupload script to actually accept it.

My first version was written in java using the jakarta commons httpclient jar. But none of the examples showed how to do it. The obvious thing - to extract a list of preset input values in the form - does not exist there.

Actually, it was not the only problem - I was testing a few gui libraries that would allow me to specify the gui portion in xml format. However, not a single one does have a widget for file-selection or directory-selection. In the end I was patching the thinlet jar to allow just that. So, the java tarball is quite big now.

On the next round I was dropping that and looking for examples in other areas - like python. I did actually find a good example where the stock python installion does have a html client library that was returning a ResponseObject with a helper method being able to extract the form values. Nice. However, it did also say that it did borrow its ideas from libwww-perl.

Actually, I had been installing the ActivePerl distribution on quite some windows PCs - and I knew that they were shipping with a Perl-TK window library. I was testing the Linux part as well and it did have it too. Great, in that case one is able to just let the user install the ActivePerl free base distribution and it does already contain both a GUI library and libwww-perl (a.k.a. LWP).

So, then I was rebuilding the scripting along the examples as found for Perl - both Perl::LWP::* and Perl::TK::*. It was not that easy but that was just because the examples were not quite taylored to the part that I was trying - an object-oriented thing that could be reused for next attempt having a fileupload guarded by login/password.

Anyway, the perl tarball is a lot smaller - and it serves the same functionality. I should have started like that in the first round. At some later point in time I do have to polish the thing into a good web documentation but hey, here is the stuff and documented.

glc.py