users@jersey.java.net

Re: [Jersey] Sending binary files over multipart/mixed

From: Craig McClanahan <Craig.McClanahan_at_Sun.COM>
Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2008 13:13:06 -0800

Gili wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I was under the impression that multipart/mixed used MIME and MIME allowed
> transparent transfer of binary data (versus say XML).
Binary entities will work just fine with multipart/mixed, just like they
work fine on individual entities with media types like
"application/octet-stream".
> Then today I ran
> across http://www.pcnineoneone.com/howto/ftp1.html which says "your file is
> encoded as text in the data stream, and converted back to binary on your
> end. The encoding adds considerable overhead to the transmission."
>
>
Note that this article is about FTP, not about HTTP :-).

Craig
> Huh? It sounds to me like he's implying that MIME requires base64 encoding.
> So who is right? Does MIME transfer binary data with or without encoding?
>
> Thank you,
> Gili
>