An Authenticated Download Application

There are plenty of sites that allow users to download software or other files for their own use. For example, a software publisher might let users download evaluation versions of software, or a movie studio’s Web site might want to let users download movie trailers. Generally, making such files available for download is simple, you just put them in a directory that’s accessible from your Web site and provide links to them.

However, let’s say that you want to control who is allowed to download the files. One way you could do it is to protect the directory where the files are stored using basic authentication, but then you’re forced into the user/password scheme of authentication, and you also have to rely ...

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