Richard Davey wrote: > So I came up with an idea that I'd like your opinions on: I built a > small but friendly Windows application (<50KB in size) that will > connect to the web server via HTTPS, check the download credentials > and if all is ok, it then downloads the file via HTTP in 1MB > chunks. The file is just a single EXE file sat outside of my web > root, and the PHP script that serves the file uses fopen() to open > the file, then fseeks to the required section of it, reads in 1MB > worth of data, closes the file and then echos this out (after > suitable headers of course, shown below) This sounds an awful lot like various web installers. It's likely that there are pre-existing applications "out there" to do the same thing as yours. They might even support interrupted downloads better, or have other features worth investigating. For sure, having them be somebody else's code to be maintained has its pros and cons. It would be worth your time, maybe, to investigate them. I'd suggest starting with the traditional installer software vendors whose name you always see when you install software. > I'm aware my app is for Windows only (although I could easily port > it to OS X), but the files they are downloading are PC games > anyway, so it's no bad thing in this case. I have been known to download a Windows app on my non-Windows work computer, and then burn a CD to take it home. Especially if it's 300MB -- where the bandwidth of the download machine is more important to the user than the OS on it. Granted, that's going to be a very very very small minority of users, but it's something to consider -- Sooner or later, you are excluding some user somewhere by limitin the download application to Windows users. -- Like Music? http://l-i-e.com/artists.htm -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
