From: Jay Levitt Date: 2007-11-18T09:25:04+09:00 Subject: Re: enterprise ruby On Mon, 12 Nov 2007 13:03:42 -0500, Charles Oliver Nutter wrote: >> The very first thing I think of when I think "Ruby and native extensions" >> is RMagick/ImageMagick for a web site. And that's notoriously difficult to >> build even in a C-based, MRI environment, although I understand that's >> supposed to be better now in 2.0 (I haven't tried it yet). >> >> What would the "right answer" be in JRuby? I just did some Googling, and >> from what I can tell, there are a few ways you could go: > > The truth is there's probably another dozen options beyond those listed > here, so it's hard to say what the best approach would be. There's even > a Java-based ImageMagick that either wraps or duplicates IM's functionality. The only Java-ImageMagick library I can find is JMagick, a JNI bridge to ImageMagick (which I'm guessing won't build in JRuby). > So I guess there's an important introductory question to ask before we > would start investigating: > > Is it ImageMagick's exact specifications or general image processing we > want to provide? The former is obviously much harder, while the latter > can be done through any number of libraries. Well, in theory, the latter; in reality, the former. ImageMagick, as unwieldy as it's been, seems to be a de facto standard in the web community. I must have installed it five zillion times by now (that's in metric, you understand) for various PHP, Perl, and Ruby packages. Only a subset of ImageMagick is really used there - basically enough to get thumbnails, text rendering, and maybe the equivalent of Amazon's image processing features (http://aaugh.com/imageabuse.html). But the API oughta Just Work. There are drop-in replacements for RMagick, like ImageScience - but even that needs FreeImage (binary!) and Ruby::Inline (C!). - Jay Levitt | Boston, MA | My character doesn't like it when they Faster: jay at jay dot fm | cry or shout or hit. http://www.jay.fm | - Kristoffer