The first method we will discuss for handling uploaded data will be quite different than any method thus far. Instead of uploading through the HTTP front-end as before, we will handle the data through a different protocol. It is not often to see a web server as the only means for sending data into a server. Legacy systems, systems that wish to support extremely large files, or even systems that need the transfer to be as optimized as possible would typically not interact via the HTML POST method.

Some examples of protocols used for file uploads that one might typically find, are:

For this example, we will use FTP as it is a bit easy to demonstrate and requires little overhead. This pattern allows the end user to anonymously upload the data via FTP into a proxy server, whose only purpose is to move the uploaded...