[Typo3-dev] Image Processing API - getting rid of IM

[Michael Johnston]

Is anyone interested in working on a graphics generation engine using 
Macromedia Fireworks?

It should be typo3 independent and have a typo3 API.

There are tremendous advantages to using Macromedia Fireworks as a 
graphics generation engine, and I've done so with great success in the 
past. Designers can easily create very complex & flexible templates in 
software they are already familiar with, without any 
programming/scripting. In fireworks, every object or text block can be 
named, meaning you can give everything you want to be dynamic a name in 
your template and then script it. Scripting a template to make certain 
parts dynamic is a more efficient and productive approach for 
team-built websites then programming a graphics generation script to 
realize a layout, and generally more efficient in machine resources 
too.

The scripting engine in Fireworks is powerful, intuitive and stable. In 
Fireworks 4, I did many thousands of lines of scripting without any 
serious bugs or instabilities.

By using Fireworks, you ensure you get full-featured text handling -- 
very good antialiasing, complete control over leading, kerning etc. 
This is something designers always complain about, that their carefully 
designed text looks like ass when generated programmatically with IM 
etc.

Fireworks Studio 2004 has a built in xml-rpc server (runs on localhost 
only, meaning it needs a front end server to be built in c++ . Or java. 
They don't supply stubs for java, but they can be generated. )

The project would require building a queue & templating system based on 
named objects in Fireworks templates (pure generation of basic images 
would also be simple to accomplish, though I personally much prefer the 
template approach as it gives non-programming designers the final 
control of look & feel without having to go through a programmer). 
Typo3 would talk to the queue, probably via an xml-rpc or soap api, and 
the queue would control Fireworks. Typo3 would have an api for talking 
to the queue. The layer in between is important as it allows you to 
move image generation to a different box. On our first typo3 site, one 
fully loaded 2 processor box is only just handling the load of being 
backend & frontend server, and only after increasing memory to 4GB.


Michael Johnston
Planetactive


On 10-Sep-04, at 7:38 PM, Michael Stucki wrote:

> Christian Jul Jensen wrote:
>
>> I've thought about this several times and have some ideas, that might
>> be useful. I'd like to take part in the design discussion at least,
>> probably also the coding.
>
> OK, I think I will simply create a new project on the newsserver.
> But I'm also interested about some answers for my questions I posted
> yesterday.
>
>> One thing that I would kie to see, is the possibility to download
>> presettings for my specific image processing environment, instead of
>> having to go through the whole setup of different flags and stuff. But
>> I can simply donwload the IM6.0.1 extension (assuming somebody already
>> made this), that provides / configures the interface implementation.
>
> A great idea!!
>
> - michael
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