Application Architecture
This is a draft
In version Alpha, MAG was organized in the following way:
The main configuration was kept into /settings/config.xml:
<title>MAG - Multimedia Ajax Gallery by The Peach</title>
Thumbnails listing and a small preview area
Big preview with a small set of thumbnails
Big preview in slideshow mode (thumbs hidden)
The Peach
blah.blah.
<title>Default Gallery</title>
default
2009-05-24
Each gallery could have its own position, and reside wherever it wanted (in this situation it would have been into /gallery/)
The content of the gallery could look like:
/gallery/
|
+-- gallery-0.xml
+-- ...(various media files)
+-- thumbs
|
+-- ...(thumbnails of the media files)
The content of gallery-0.xml describes all the images contained with several additional attributes:
<title>Prova 4</title>
2009-05-02
Reggio Emilia
...
The name of the thumbnail was
image_filename"-thumb.jpg"
This structure can easily make search a big problem: a search could end up opening and closing several hundred files, one per each gallery, lookup in a xml structure can be obnoxious per se and deciding to collapse everything in the same structure can end up having pretty much the same performance problems (although that can fill up the memory when trying to load an xml file of thousands of MB if not GB who knows).
Please take a look at Gallery UX before proceeding.
After a little bit of thinking the solution I will try to keep is: link to galleries are kept in system wide configuration and are strictly related to the user, then each gallery will have his xml to list all the images. The association to collections can be done via RDF, but that's yet to be decided since we would lack a proper RDF engine to do semantic reasoning on top of it.