Uppy beta launches with new crash recovery feature
Our team has just concluded a great 2017 meetup in Berlin where besides having some fun, our goal has been nailing the Uppy Transloadit integration and making it that much more reliable. Specifically, we wanted to survive a browser crash, letting the user pick up where he left off.
Uppy is of course our next-generation open source file uploader that aims to be the final word on uploading files using the web browser. It already makes use of our open protocol for resumable file uploads tus.io making it very robust. Aside from robust, we aim to make this uploader full featured and have a great user experience. For this we invited our our designer Alex, who has recently been helping us make transloadit.com more delightful, to re-imagine the user interface of our uploader also. We also hired René to work on Uppy and he's been a big asset when it comes fleshing out the Transloadit integration as well as figuring out other tricky subjects. All of course under the guidance of Artur who has been leading the Uppy efforts since day one.
On the Transloadit side, Ife our Uppy Server lead, worked together with Tim and Abdel on hardening Uppy Server and running it as a service in Transloadit's datacenters, along with logging, health monitoring, scaling and all the things that requires. Marius, who is leading the tus project, helped design the ideal workflow for how all these components could reliably be linked together. AJ started working on the announcement (and other) blog posts already, and Kevin was the "Flying Keep" trying to help out where help was needed most. So you see, while it's quite hard to pick a project that would keep everybody busy equally, all Transloadians had a chance to really contribute, and we're all thrilled with the result.
Uppy ❤️ Transloadit public beta
We are encouraging developer and customer out there that have a use case for uploading from the web browser and optionally encoding those files, to start playing around with Uppy today. Probably don't use it for your most serious project just yet since our velocity of iteration is still quite high and we're not "1.0" just yet, but we feel confident that your users will already enjoy what Uppy and Transloadit can provide today.
Recovering from a browser crash
As said, aside from now providing Uppy Server as a service, much of our time went into "GoldenRetriever", the (temporary) name of a new Plugin, which purpose is to let the user resume uploading after a browser crash.
Let's look at what would happen previously. Let's say your user is uploading 5 files of a gigabyte each. Halfway file 3, the browser crashes. The user opens their browser again, and Chrome offers to restore the tabs. The user is looking at the tab that Uppy was in. Uppy is loaded fresh and the user is expected to find the same 5 files and start the upload from scratch. Not a great user experience.
Now we had to jump through a lot of hoops and much is not working yet, but here is a teaser of what happens with GoldenRetriever in action 😄