[Techtalk] another client-side scripting question

[Caroline Johnston]

Hi,

I've been reading the thread about the problems of client-side scripting 
and I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions about the best way to 
approach a problem:

I'm trying to put a web interface onto some tools we have for analysing
the results of some experiments. What's the best way of allowing a user to
upload some arbitrary, but potentially quite large, number of files? At
the moment I'm using an applet, but is there a better way?

It occurred to me that maybe the best approach would be a standalone
application that users could download that would allow them to sftp files
directly to their directory on the server. This would also avoid the
problem of having to permit big file uploads over http, which I imagine is
leaving the server open to all manner of unpleasantness.  Unfortunately my
programming skills don't extend much beyond perl scripting yet, so I'm not
sure I could make a tool like this even if I wanted to. Is it a reasonable
idea and if so, has someone else already thought it, done it and made it
freely available for tinkering with?

Thanks for any suggestions,

Cass