I am using Ink (Filepicker.io) to perform multi-file uploads and it is working brilliantly.
However, a quick look around the internet shows multi-file downloads are more complicated. While I know it is possible to spin up an EC2 instance to zip on the fly, this would also entail some wait-time on the user's part, and the newly created file would also not be available on my Cloudfront immediately.
Has anybody done this before, and what are the practical UX implications - is the wait time significant enough to negatively affect the user experience?
The obvious solution would be to create the zipped files ahead of time, but this would result in some (unnecessary?) redundancy.
What is the best way to avoid redundant storage while reducing wait times for on-the-fly folder compression?
You can create the ZIP archive on the client side using JavaScript. Check out:
http://stuk.github.io/jszip/