Month: November 2020

Project: PhotoHosting

Description

This is a very simple website offering uploading and sharing of 2 megapixel size photos, at a relatively high quality, social-media aware, and very hard to “steal”.

Motivation

A lot of free image hosting services are either overly ad-filled, or explicitly prevent uploading content which may be considered “NSFW”.

I wanted something less restrictive, less busy with ads (but still able to have ads on it), using some technologies which I would hope would facilitate fast I/O.

One principle was to try to always have the photo viewer coerced into visiting the website itself, as opposed to simply serving the image file.

This is accomplished by having the social media thumbnails relatively small, and a lower quality. Any attempt to actively open the image itself will always result in the webapp serving an entire page with the image embedded.

Technologies

I wrote this website is written in Java on the Apache Struts 2 framework accessing an HBase database.

Of the NoSQL databases, HBase seemed to be the only one which natively supports larger binary content, so it was a relatively easy option.

You can access the primary site here: https://photohosting.hostnucleus.ca/

To view an example of how the photos are presented: https://photohosting.hostnucleus.ca/show/cooked-chicken-on-white-plate-8de5b69c-020d-4480-addc-5d3af7013ba8.action

Update

Well, thanks to the complete cluster-fuck that is Java 11 (with it’s complete butchering of Java compatibility), and Apache’s lacklustre ability to move HBase away from Java 1.8, this project is officially dead. I simply cannot get the Tomcat webapp to talk to HBase.

So … yeah … fuck the OpenJDK “community”, and fuck Apache.

Project: Kalliope

Last year, I set myself the task of trying to actually produce a bunch of smaller web projects for s few reasons:

  • To learn some new frameworks
  • To illustrate my ability to learn there different frameworks
  • To showcase my skills in development in general

To that end, I thought I’d explain each project here in my blog, and the motivation behind each.

First up is Kalliope – https://kalliope.hostnucleus.ca

This is a “font server” with two primary end-goals – be able to arbitrarily upload a true type font, and have it produce web downloadable fonts, or to actively serve unlicensed fonts (in the same vein as Google Fonts).

The latter end-goal (as detailed above) was actually the primary goal on project inception – I wanted to have the ability to use a variety of fonts, but I didn’t want Google snooping the traffic on my sites (e.g. cookies, etc.). You can think of it as a replace for Google Fonts, really.

The other end-goal came about when the place where I worked had a client who had purchased some proprietary font, and wanted it used on their website. I didn’t want this font directly in the font server itself (as it requires a license), but all the leg-work had already been done to perform the conversion.

Interestingly enough, the original work on this was actually done for a completely different project – I had implemented a lot of the code within a project for generating print materials using SVGs. Since the SVGs needed to be displayable in all browsers, as well as the final PDF, I decided to use “FontForge” to do all the heavy lifting. It was only years later when developing a website where it occurred to me to break out the functionality into a separate web service.

It’s also a good project to learn and showcase the Grails framework.