Introduction
Web portals provide users a central gateway for accessing various resources and services. At the same time, they provide users a platform for contributing resources to be shared with other users. Users might share anything from photos to audio and video files to scientific datasets for research use. Therefore, file upload is a basic and necessary function of Web portals.
Today's Web portals are heavily based on Java portlet technology. While progress bars for file upload have been described by various developers using Ajax, we have yet to discover one that is portlet based. This article shows how to develop an Ajax-based file upload portlet that displays a progress bar during the file upload process. This portlet is particularly useful for those who need to share large audio, video, and scientific files.