ajax for image manipulation?

February 5, 2008 9:08 PM

AJAXfilter: Is there a framework that would be good for building an app that can place, move, resize, and rotate images on a page ala blingee?

Or, are there any similar almost-there open source projects?
Have you seen this ridiculous blingee website?

posted by low affect to computers & internet (3 answers total)

Without diving in too far it looks like they're using Scriptaculous library for some of the sign up pages.
posted by bitdamaged at 9:23 PM on February 5, 2008

Image rotation using only javascript is no mean feat, pretty sure it's not part of any library. Last year I got most of the way through a project that did image scaling, rotation, and translation using the new canvas element (and google's IECanvas for IE support)... before we pulled the project and the client moved over to Flash largely because there were just a few quirks that were becoming agonizing to nail out. Not to mention the fact that things got really slow when using real photo sizes.

Things get a little easier to program if you're willing to have more of the processing done on the server side -- but that comes at a cost on the server side and introduces some round-trip latency. Keeping things on the client side avoids those problems.

So, my recommendation is: use Flash. Maybe even a Java applet. If you must do it in Javascript for some reason and SVG support has improved in the last year, that might be a better way, but other than that, the canvas method is it. Feel free to email me -- I'm willing and able to share some of the work that I did earlier.
posted by weston at 10:01 PM on February 5, 2008

I have an app that uses canvas for image rotation/translation as weston describes. It works well on Firefox in windows and Safari on the mac. Beware if you are concerned about linux perfomance in Firefox though. Certain image operations are 2 to 3 orders of magnitude slower in Linux than Windows due to having lack of cairo hardware rendering for canvas, which will make your app basically unusable. Still not fixed in FF3.

SVG isn't as broken in FF+linux as canvas is, but still lacks hardware rendering.

As weston says, using flash is probably what you want.
posted by rajbot at 10:13 PM on February 5, 2008