Processing photos on demand with Photon

How do you communicate with Photon, is it over HTTP? (I know nothing of this "JAX-RS" you speak of). I was thinking of building something like this for my photo warping app Trollaroid -- currently all the processing is done on client devices, but it'd be much more sensible to do it in the cloud. How might hooking up my API endpoint to an array of Java image processors over HTTP compare to say, using ZeroMQ as the glue?

The name "Photon" is used by at least three other opensource projects:<p>* A library of utility code by Alvaro Carrasco [1]<p>* A Mongrel2-PHP web apps framework [2] (which is what I was expecting the linked page would be about)<p>* A framework for Silverlight applications [3]<p>I know it's hard to choose names, but really, 10 seconds with google should have suggested this particular name is already a bit crowded.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.photonframework.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page" rel="nofollow">http://www.photonframework.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page</a> [2] <a href="http://www.photon-project.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.photon-project.com/</a> [3] <a href="http://photon.codeplex.com/" rel="nofollow">http://photon.codeplex.com/</a>

How does this compare to something like Dragonfly (<a href="https://github.com/markevans/dragonfly/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/markevans/dragonfly/</a>)? 1000memories's issue was with the time it took to generate 12 different versions, not the speed of Imagemagick itself. So I'm not quite sure why they needed to write their own extension. Even Carrierwave (plus caching of course) can be setup this way (<a href="https://gist.github.com/1541912" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/1541912</a>).

Thanks for open sourcing this 1000mem. What is average request latency for a 2mb photo? We tried to do something similar with python, but we found there's a 300ms latency between s3 and ec2. It takes quite a few seconds to transfer from s3 to ec2, resize it, and transfer to client. You mentioned using caching to speed things up, but what about the first request?

If you're interested in other examples of this sort of solution, this is how Shopify has tackled this problem: <a href="https://github.com/tobi/imagery" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/tobi/imagery</a><p>It looks like tobi also has played around with porting it to go as well: <a href="https://github.com/tobi/imagery-go" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/tobi/imagery-go</a>

Awesome to see something like this open sourced. Definitely going to check this out. For those who don't have the resources available to manage this kind of infrastructure however, you may wish to look at Cloudinary (<a href="http://cloudinary.com/" rel="nofollow">http://cloudinary.com/</a>).

need to use progressive jpeg if picture is large: <a href="http://photon-example.herokuapp.com/lily199iu;w=2000" rel="nofollow">http://photon-example.herokuapp.com/lily199iu;w=2000</a>