Comments on: Busy.js: Loading indicators with Canvas

By: MorganRoderick

MorganRoderick — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 17:40:28 +0000

Yup, licensing is a no go for my uses.

It’ll be interesting to see what the licensing model will be, if someone decides to buy it.

Impressive work, too bad he’s not really trying to sell it to developers. Cryptic licenses only sells software if you’re an established Enterprise vendor :P

By: besh

besh — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 11:43:45 +0000

Nice tool, but not so nice licensing :(

By: Tahir

Tahir — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 21:39:39 +0000

@jamienk: That and a lot more very helpful information is kept to the browser for security reasons. JavaScript in general has limited access to HTTP transaction. Even with XMLHttpRequest object, you have controls over only the request and some parts of HTTP transaction but never the TCP/IP. Thus making this very tricky. In flash however you do have more information available to onProgress() method in FileReference object -> http://livedocs.macromedia.com/flash/8/main/00002204.html. If you have $$$ like flickr, you can write your activeX for IE and FF and get that and whole lot more info to JavaScript :-)

By: Tr0y

Tr0y — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 20:18:30 +0000

@jamien: No you can’t see bytes uploaded, w/o some help. See http://swfupload.org/

By: jamienk

jamienk — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 16:13:26 +0000

The pace where you’d want a progress meter most — not the spinning “busy” as here — is for file uploads. But this is very very hard to achieve. You need either a Flash solution (that is pretty complex and has limitations), or a of combination PHP and perl (which I could not easily get to work), or a bleeding edge version of PHP (which I can’t install on shared hosts). Why isn’t an upload progress API exposed to JavaScript? Doesn’t the browser have all the info it needs? File-size, bytes uploaded…