Six years after Ajax was widely popularized with the introduction of Gmail, we are still stuck with synchronous file uploading. Certain techniques have done their best to fill this niche by using Flash apps, hidden iframes and the like, but all have felt like hacks at best.

Enter jquery-binaryUpload, a jQuery plugin I wrote to allow asynchronous file uploading in Firefox 3.5+, Chrome 5+ and Safari 4+. It works in Firefox 3.5 through the use of the File object, while in Firefox 4+ and the other browsers it takes advantage of the FormData object. The plugin papers over these different implementations with a clean simple interface.

The included sample code demonstrates typical usage with a Sinatra or Rails app though the plugin itself is completely framework agnostic. Callbacks are descriptive while additional options are outlined in the documentation. Please report any problems you run into or suggestions you have. Enjoy!

The IE Question
So far as I have been able to glean from my research, asynchronous uploading in Internet Explorer, short of an ActiveX control or one of the aforementioned techniques, is not currently feasible. IE does not natively support the FormData or File objects and the IE9 dev team makes no mention of it on their site. My efforts to contact their dev team have been to no avail.