I've been playing with Spring and Hibernate both at work before I went on vacation and on my on-again-off-again image database (you know, inbetween taking care of a toddler, a recovering wife, homework, a new baby...all that "Free time"). Both are pretty sweet, apart or together. I had finally finished rolling my own mostly trasparent persistence on top of iBatis SQLMaps for the image database; it took a long time, but at least it was finally done and I could continue into actually realzing the real part of the application. Then I decide to rewrite it (again) with Spring, just to learn it. In just the little amount of time I've spent though, things are much futher along. It really didn't take long at all to hammer the persistence out with Hibernate, and most of that was overhead in learning it.
The spring MVC framework is pretty good as well. It doesn't take very long at all to get the basic "CRUD" forms for everything up and running. I'm finally working on some of the trickier, more interestings parts of the thing. I'll be posting a few more things here about it as it expands.
Right now I'm working on mapping one of the more complex forms to the right Spring concepts. Should I just use the domain objects, or does this form need its own command object, and how complex should propertyEditors be? I asked this question on the spring forums, feel free to contribute thoughts or ideas here or there.
Basically, I'm working on the image upload form, which is 3-4 step wizard-type form. Upload either an image or a zip of images. The next page is the thumbnail(s) with fields for the metadata. You submit that, then they are all saved in the database, and the next page is (optionally, you can hit finish at the previous page) is the images with the options for manipulating them (adding borders/rotating/resizing, etc).
How are you doing the image manipulation? In Java? I've poked around and have not found any simple APIs out there, so I'm curious how you're doing this.
And if you're going to roll your own, do you want any help?
I'm using JAI:
http://java.sun.com/products/java-media/jai/
It's a little overkill for what I'm using it for, but I've certainly got room to grow if I want to add more than the basics. I'm actually getting to use some of the stuff I learned in that computer graphics class...who knew? :-)
I'd love some help. once I get the basics up and going (which I'm close on, but a neural network homework assignment is currently getting in the way). I'll probably create a project on sourceforge or java.net or something, but I want to make sure it's actually useful first, it's not quite ready yet.
How about a "not useful" source snapshot? :)
If you're going to use JAI, I guess your implementation will get "the internet-scaled performance, intelligence, and reliability that will become critical for the high quality-of-service requirements of e-business." for free.
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