[unisog] uploading folders to with web applications

[Russell Fulton]

We have just had a meeting with some folk from our medical school about
transferring medical images.  In the past these transfers were not time
critical and they simply couriered CDs around the world.  That is about
to change and they now need much faster transfers.

Their problem is that they are getting these images from hospitals all
over Asia and the Pacific.  The hospital systems are typically very
tightly tied down and the only thing we can count on is a web browser
(in particular we can't count on having and archiver software, e.g.
zip).  They really like our web drop box <webdropoff.auckland.ac.nz> but
for the fact that it can only handle one file at a time serverely limits
it usefulness for this application.  Typically MRI scanners produce
hundreds of images in a directory hierarchy and they need to preserve
this structure.  In normal situation we would say that the sender should
zip the file before uploading but in some cases this will not be easy. 
If the systems are that tied down I would expect (hope?) Java and
JavaScript to also be disabled.

We are looking at extending/customising our web drop box for their use
and need a way of uploading a folder hierarchy rather than a single file
through a web application in a simple straight forward manner.

Our development folk tell us that they don't know of any way of doing
this without some form of additional software on the remote system. 
Does anyone out there have any solutions or even ideas that we can pursue?

At the moment our fall back position is that the remote system will have
to have access to winzip but if we can avoid that then it would be a
Good Thing (tm).

Russell