Comment roll your own (Score 1) 62
I did my own. Been working on it and upgrading it for about 7 years now. Actually I started it as a plugin to Slashcode. Working on that project has ben my way to keep up with stuff. I moved from using Slashcode's DB accessors to Class::DBI, then I decided to ditch slashcode entirely and use Catalyst, then I ditched Class::DBI in favor of DBIx::Class. I have javascript/JSON/AJAX (is AJAJ a real term yet?) interface. We (my wife and I) use it to organize photos and build a static public site. Gallery and the like annoy me because so many pictures suck and people take no time at all to cull the bad ones. So my system is all inward facing, and we pick the good ones (good being subjective, of course) and assemble a static site with words and images, etc. Static is really easy on the server when hit by grandparents and aunts and uncles.
I've played with Image::Magick mostly to do the image manipulation. I looked at GD, but it wasn't feature-full enough. At one time I had lots of interface stuff for Image::Magick routines, like brightness and contrast, etc etc, but even I wasn't using them, so I deleted them. At the moment I have a nifty ajax thing for area of interest, and rotation, and that's pretty much it, but a hold over from the complicated filter days is that I have a crazy pipeline of eval'ed perl stored in the database representing a transform to apply to an image, so that when it is rotated, colored, brightened, or whatever, the transform is applied to the original image, rather than obliterating the original. And in doing that I learned that sometimes a join table in a database has to be three way, or you can get big problems. So I've got a threeway join table, linking the imageid, blobid, and transformid. And I have a small clue about database normalization.
And taking a cue from Slashcode (right before I ditched the code) I bought the argument that it was a good idea to stick images directly in the database. So that's where they are, blobs in the the database. Now I regret that as my images have grown to 2-3 MB rather than about 200K when I started out. Apparently you can play tricks with the server to just memcopy an image from a filesystem to the browser, but not if the image is stuffed in a database.
blah blah blah. I know lots about this stuff, and about perl and apache and mysql and postgresql and ajax and so on that I never would have learned had I not "rolled my own" Why just last weekend I learned about perlcritic and perltidy, and realized how far my usual idioms are from those recommended by Damian Conway. So now I am on a perldoc diet until perlcritic stops whining at me.
I've played with Image::Magick mostly to do the image manipulation. I looked at GD, but it wasn't feature-full enough. At one time I had lots of interface stuff for Image::Magick routines, like brightness and contrast, etc etc, but even I wasn't using them, so I deleted them. At the moment I have a nifty ajax thing for area of interest, and rotation, and that's pretty much it, but a hold over from the complicated filter days is that I have a crazy pipeline of eval'ed perl stored in the database representing a transform to apply to an image, so that when it is rotated, colored, brightened, or whatever, the transform is applied to the original image, rather than obliterating the original. And in doing that I learned that sometimes a join table in a database has to be three way, or you can get big problems. So I've got a threeway join table, linking the imageid, blobid, and transformid. And I have a small clue about database normalization.
And taking a cue from Slashcode (right before I ditched the code) I bought the argument that it was a good idea to stick images directly in the database. So that's where they are, blobs in the the database. Now I regret that as my images have grown to 2-3 MB rather than about 200K when I started out. Apparently you can play tricks with the server to just memcopy an image from a filesystem to the browser, but not if the image is stuffed in a database.
blah blah blah. I know lots about this stuff, and about perl and apache and mysql and postgresql and ajax and so on that I never would have learned had I not "rolled my own" Why just last weekend I learned about perlcritic and perltidy, and realized how far my usual idioms are from those recommended by Damian Conway. So now I am on a perldoc diet until perlcritic stops whining at me.
