Let the developer upload what they want. Have your server process the artefacts and extract them onto the server. If this allows you to do that progress bar malarky.
If the developer is hosting with you, they can accept that you might want to extract their JARs for cool factor reasons.
I suppose they might need to use a gamelizard api call to register the resources they want downloaded aswell tho?
Kev
What do you mean by artifacts?
I’m not sure… would they? It’s been a while! I thought just having it in the same folder would do the trick.
Artifacts - zips, jars, class files, resources - what ever they want to upload.
Re: registering resources. If the developer is just using the class loader and only refers to the resources when they’re required then the retrieval from the server will happen at that moment, so you could be mid-game and because the developer has been testing locally they pull the resources from the class loader just as they need them.
In applets where you’d like everything pre-cached if possible (with a cute loading bar) you’d like to make sure all of the remote resources have been retrieved at startup - so you’d need to encourage the developer to at least access the resources early to get them retrieved. But then maybe theres a cool applet way of doing this with magic that I don’t know about - don’t generally play in applet land.
Kev
In my Applet’s I use Class.getResourceAsStream() to load external stuff. I like the idea here, I’m gonna try and go with it.
if i was doing it i would probably give developers a folder to upload anything to, and require details for webstart/applet/flash to be handled somewhat apart from that. the api could be provided as source or jar or whatever so people can easily integrate it with their game.
Why not just use jars? Signed ones, at that?
Cas 
After getting into it a little bit more I realized giving them ability to extract files and fully use a folder means I have to basically build ftp type tools and I don’t want to get into that at all. Way too complicated. Instead I’m going to require jar’s only. My API will be in its own jar that will also be accessible.
i humbly request an iotd (image of the day) feature, similar to what used to exist at http://iotd.kaioa.com/ or what is currently existent at gamedev.net (but not broken like that one is ;)).
gareth
Good idea! I think we can find a space for the IOTD once things get rolling.
As for the site, it’s coming along! Currently everything in my test environment works, but now I’m ironing out the kinks involved with sym-linked folders and subversion and capistrano yadda yadda.
Basically I’m new to Ruby on Rails (what I’ve developed this in) and I’m way newer at actually setting up and deploying my own app. So I’m learning a lot, but unfortunately this makes me pretty slow
So far on the live site I can upload a Flash game, an Applet game which is only a class file, and an Applet game which lives inside a Jar file. I don’t have any examples to test that involve more than 1 jar file needing to be loaded. Is that even possible with applets? I dunno… As far as Webstart goes, I’m putting that on the backburner.
So that just leaves one thing left for the first release, logos! I have them working locally, and on the live site they’re being uploaded properly and resized and such… but something is still buggy. It can’t seem to pull up the image once I upload it (again with the nasty sym-linked directories I think). Once I get that worked out, I’ll make a new thread asking people to check it out and upload their games.
The reason why I decided to post this now even though I’m SOOO close is that since the weekend is up, I might not get to touch it again until next weekend 
Busy busy busy…
Until then, hold your breath!
I’m gonna hate myself in the morning, but I stayed up late to finish. Off I go to make the new thread…