A Tiny Script Becomes a Top Open Source Project

A tiny open source script named MegaUpload, has suddenly found itself among the top 1% projects at sourceforge. The popularity of MegaUpload stems from the fact that it provides a solution to a long standing problem for web developers.

PHP is one of the most commonly used technologies for building web sites. Though PHP has an easy to use file upload mechanism, it cannot display a progress indicator while files are being transferred. This often leads to confusion, with many users closing their browser before the upload is completed, unaware that it is still in progress. This user behavior is most noticeable with large files or very slow network connections.

A solution became available with the release of megaupload in August. Since then there has seen over 4,000 downloads of this software. Quite an achievement for script thats just over ten kilobytes in size.

Based on the number of downloads and other factors MegaUpload has been rated among the top 1% of projects listed on Sourceforge. Which is the largest collection of open source projects on the internet. This success has prompted the author to expand the project to include support for perl and JSP - two other technologies with the same problem.

The software is the creation of Raditha Dissanayake, the chief software architect of Rad Inks (Pvt) Ltd, itself an innovative IT company. Megaupload is available free of charge and can be downloaded at http://www.raditha.com/megaupload/