Hugo Saves the Day for Java Image Resizing

Many thanks owed to Hugo over at Component House for his article on High-Quality Image Resize with Java. Since creating ByFolio, I've been unsettled about the quality of the smaller thumbnails created for the main showcase page. Particularly, text looked absolutely abysmal.

Here's an example of the medium size thumbnail generated from this original image:

Yuck, yuck, yuck. This atrocity was accomplished with a simple AffineTransform operation in Java to scale down from 525px x 525px to 275px x 275px. I had previously played around with setting aliasing values during the scale operation, but did not get significant improvements. As an added bonus, that black line along the right-hand side of the image is an artifact of the scaling operation when done incorrectly. All in all, I was left pretty disappointed by the results, but was forced to move on.

Hugo's article filled in the missing piece of the puzzle: blur the image, then do the resize! Here's the result:

Much better! I also took the opportunity to fix the black-line bug, and wrote a quick script to go back and fix all of the folio images that were already created. There's still room for improvement, but I can now table this until I have the time to go back and write a more universal image processor that can handle formats other than JPEGs.

Thanks Hugo!

Posted at 05:59PM Mar 31, 2008 by Cory in Development  |  Comments[1]

Building ByFolio

I've gotten a number of inquiries on the framework behind this site, and how it was built.

To put it in concise technical terms, the ByFolio interface is an XML SOAP web service client written in JavaScript, and employing AJAX techniques. The web service itself was written in Java, using Axis2, running in the Tomcat6 servlet container.

I'm sure there are other folks out there that are also building production web applications on top of SOAP web services. I don't know of any, so if you do, I'd love to hear from you!

Now, for the actual story behind this approach, we'll have to go back to the motivations that had me looking at web services to begin with. You can read Part 1 of this story on my professional blog Standing on the Brink.

Posted at 11:11AM Mar 21, 2008 by Cory in Development  |  Comments[1]