Zein's place on the net » RoR http://ahmed.elze.in/blog my views on Australia, Egypt, Linux and other stuff Tue, 19 Apr 2011 04:40:40 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2 Caching the book cover images http://ahmed.elze.in/blog/2006/12/02/caching-the-book-cover-images/ http://ahmed.elze.in/blog/2006/12/02/caching-the-book-cover-images/#comments Sat, 02 Dec 2006 18:31:24 +0000 Ahmed http://www.azein.com/blog/?p=42 In my “mybooklist” application I deal with lots of images! My current method has been to store the uploaded book covers in public/images/bookcovers/isbnnumber.png” and creating thumbnails on the fly in the list and grid views!

Of course this is a very bad thing to do! The load on my server was going crazy with all the CPU intensive image manipulation going on! I had to do something.

The task required to different solutions. The first was client side caching to prevent the browser downloading the image multiple times! to achieve this I modified the show browser function like so:

# 2. we see if we need to send the file or not
        lastmod = File.stat(filepath).mtime
        minTime = Time.rfc2822(@request.env["HTTP_IF_MODIFIED_SINCE"]) rescue nil
        if minTime and lastmod < = minTime
            # use cached version
            render_text '', '304 Not Modified'
        else
            # send image

now I only send the image to the client only in I need to!

The second area of improvement was the thumbnail creation on the fly! I first tried the rails

caches_page :show_cover

but I found myself in a situation where I was sending the image to the client every time because rails was sending the cached image without ever running the show_cover function (and my browser cache code)!

I guess I am just going to generate the thumbnails in the create and update functions. The app should feel a lot different and the load on the server should stay low!

]]> http://ahmed.elze.in/blog/2006/12/02/caching-the-book-cover-images/feed/ 0 My first open source project http://ahmed.elze.in/blog/2006/11/26/my-first-open-source-project/ http://ahmed.elze.in/blog/2006/11/26/my-first-open-source-project/#comments Sun, 26 Nov 2006 05:06:26 +0000 Ahmed http://www.azein.com/blog/?p=34 After looking for a simple clean application to hold my book collection and coming up empty, I decided to write one myself!

The application is written in Ruby on Rails (ROR) and will have the following features!

  • admin user to update and edit
  • book grabber from amazon (enter the ISBN and all the data is entered automagicly -including the image of the front cover-)
  • search by author, category ,book title or publisher
  • list or grid view
  • sexy smart looking with a very clean interface!
  • rate books
  • wish list
  • mark as borrowed with the borrowers name

I have registered a project at sourceforge.com and will upload the source as soon as the project is approved!

here are a couple of screen shots:

books grid view

books list view

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