How do i upload/stream large images using Spring 3.2 spring-mvc in a restful way

As it looks as if you are using spring you could use HttpEntity ( http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/3.1.x/javadoc-api/org/springframework/http/HttpEntity.html ).

Using it, you get something like this (look at the 'payload' thing):

@Controller
public class ImageServerEndpoint extends AbstractEndpoint {

@Autowired private ImageMetadataFactory metaDataFactory;
@Autowired private FileService fileService;

@RequestMapping(value="/product/{spn}/image", method=RequestMethod.PUT) 
public ModelAndView handleImageUpload(
        @PathVariable("spn") String spn,
        HttpEntity<byte[]> requestEntity, 
        HttpServletResponse response) throws IOException {
    byte[] payload = requestEntity.getBody();
    HttpHeaders headers = requestEntity.getHeaders();

    try {
        ProductImageMetadata metaData = metaDataFactory.newSpnInstance(spn, headers);
        fileService.store(metaData, payload);
        response.setStatus(HttpStatus.NO_CONTENT.value());
        return null;
    } catch (IOException ex) {
        return internalServerError(response);
    } catch (IllegalArgumentException ex) {
        return badRequest(response, "Content-Type missing or unknown.");
    }
}

We're using PUT here because it's a RESTfull "put an image to a product". 'spn' is the products number, the imagename is created by fileService.store(). Of course you could also POST the image to create the image resource.

When you send a POST request, there are two type of encoding you can use to send the form/parameters/files to the server, i.e. application/x-www-form-urlencoded and multipart/form-data. Here is for more reading.

Using application/x-www-form-urlencoded is not a good idea if you have a large content in your POST request because it usually crashes the web browser (from my experience). Thus, multipart/form-data is recommended.

Spring can handle multipart/form-data content automatically if you add a multipart resolver to your dispatcher. Spring's implementation for handling this is done using apache-commons-fileupload so you will need to add this library to your project.

Now for the main answer of how to actually do it is already been blogged here http://viralpatel.net/blogs/spring-mvc-multiple-file-upload-example/

I hope that might help you to find a solution. You may want to read up about what REST is. It sounds like you are a bit confused. Basically, almost all http requests are RESTful even if the urls are ugly.