Upload large folders/files and do the compression

Hi

I have been looking hi and low for some solid technology to allow the
following on our site. The site needs to allow the customer to bundle
a art project that could contain anything from images, folders, fonts
application files like Adobe Illustrator etc… and upload it. We
would prefere to have the user just drag and drop the folder and the
client app that would compress (zip, tar, gzip,… Needs to preserve
resource forks on OS X) and send the bundle to the server. I have
looked at some of the java applet/plugin offerings but would prefer
something more rails like. In fact we have a perl app that is using
the java plugin method and not very well… Any suggestions would be
appreciated.

-dale