Image Gallery Portlet – Overview

Hello.

It has been quite a while now since our last post. But this time we have pretty good news. The development of our portlets made progress. My part – the image gallery – is near completion. The web front end part will be developed this weekend. Compared to other big open source galleries the set of user features is basic. Special though, comparing to other galleries, is the possibility to transparently use completely different content providers per folder for getting the images. One content folder could get its content from a content management system like Alfresco (this part is being developed at the moment), another content folder for example from the file system, Flickr or another CMS.

The user has the ability to create content folders and specify content providers for each of them. Each content provider has a different set of default properties which can be edited by the user. Via web front end the user can choose which content of the underlying content provider should be displayed.

A new content provider can be developed easily as there exists an API. To use the new content provider only two steps are necessary:

1. Put the jar with the implemented content provider interfaces into the classpath of the image gallery and
2. provide the full classpath to the content provider “main” class within the image gallery configuration file

As you can see the code is prepared to be enhanced easily and that is why we hope to elate other developers to join our project when the project thesis has been completed. When the interface development has been stabilized I will provide an UML-Class-Diagram to get an overview of the API.

Like any other image gallery the user will be able to organize his pictures in folders and have thumbnail images to preview them. ICEFaces 1.6 is used to provide the user with a rich Web 2.0 Experience and a clear user interface. At the moment there does not exist a possibility to upload pictures via the portlet itself. The upload is done via the content provider (eg CMS like Alfresco) and only displaying is done via the portlet.

Regards,

Phillip Merensky