From: Charles Oliver Nutter <charles.nutter@...>
Date: 2007-11-18T10:27:05+09:00
Subject: Re: enterprise ruby

Jay Levitt wrote:
> The only Java-ImageMagick library I can find is  JMagick, a JNI bridge to
> ImageMagick (which I'm guessing won't build in JRuby).

Actually, it probably would work fine, but I'm not sure anyone's tried 
it. Of course, JNI brings along its own considerations, but nothing in 
JRuby prevents JNI from working; it's just more painful to wire 
libraries in from scratch using JNI.

> 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!).

I guess my specific problem with RMagick (beyond those that e.g. 
inspired ImageScience) is that like most Ruby extensions there's no 
abstraction going on. It's little more than a wrapper around a C 
library, resulting in apps being tightly coupled to one specific 
image-processing library. If that weren't the case, and if the 
operations were a bit more abstracted, it would be a lot easier to 
provide the same functionality from any other library.

- Charlie