AreaJ
Summary
This is the SourceForge home of the AreaJ project. AreaJ is an advanced online archival application suite for digital image storage and management. There is also a personal homepage of areaj at areaj.org.
News
4/3/2002: AreaJ 1.2 is out! 1.2 is a maintentance release providing the following main features:
- Implement upgrade script for data migration from 1.0.
- Make it possible to run two areaj servers on the same machine
- Implement 404 handler to make display of result pages much speedier
- caption owners have the right to delete captions (rather than the owner of the image)
- fixed a bug wherein browsing all users' captions was causing a crash
3/19/02: AreaJ 1.1 has just been released on this site (see the download links). File package on sourceforge soon to follow.
License
AreaJ is built using many open-source libraries. Also, I believe strongly in the value of open source. AreaJ is therefore (c) Thomas K. Burkholder and redistributable under the GNU General Public License.
Feature Set
The feature set is huge, but I'll try to distill it down to large functional areas:
- Advanced image searching capabilities - the core innovation of AreaJ is that it provides a way to manage large sets of images by caption. A caption can be associated with any number of images, and a given image may be associated with any number of captions. Images may be found by caption, owning user, and several other factors.
- Calendar-based image lookup - by EXIF date and user.
- Automated thumbnailing, four standard sizes of images (including automated application of prior edits)
- File archive upload using HTTP, and management of previously uploaded archive files.
- A complete and up-to-date help document.
- Complete handling and display of EXIF image data.
- Simple but effective image presentation - images are framed and drop-shadowed for visual impact.
- Flexible image display, including slideshows and configurable layout.
- Sophisticated, multi-page image selection and editing tools, providing the ability to caption, rotate, sharpen, brighten, etc., on an arbitrarily selected set of images. Images are edited in place, where possible, eliminating many irritating page refreshes.
- Sophisticated user/security model, including password encryption, user level quotas and the ability to mark images private. Both on-line and command-line tools are provided for administrator users to add, delete, enable, or disable users, change quotas, reset passwords, add or remove administrator capabilities for other users, and more.
You may also find the latest Help file useful.
Installation Requirements
AreaJ uses exclusively open-source, off-the-shelf libraries and products, most notably apache, mod_perl and mysql. I mostly run it on Debian/unstable, but it should be possible to run on nearly any linux or bsd box, with minor tweaking. Here is a list taken from a recent README file from the install tarball:
Packages I had to install on debial/linux:
- perl (5.6)
- mysql-common
- mysql-client
- mysql-server
- imagemagick
- apache
- apache-common
- apache-dev
- libapache-mod-ssl
- libapache-mod-perl
- libapache-request-perl
- libapache-session-perl
- libapache-dbi-perl
- libdbd-mysql-perl
- perlmagick
- libcompress-zlib-perl
- libmd5-perl
- libdate-calc-perl
CPAN modules:
- Archive-Tar
- Archive-Zip
- Class-ObjectTemplate
- Compress-Zlib-1.11 (if you didn't get it from libcompress-zlib-perl)
- Crypt-PasswdMD5-1.0
- Data-Dump
- IO-String
- Image-Info
- Math-Round
- String-ParseWords
- Term-ReadPassword
- Text-BasicTemplate
- libwww-perl
- MIME-Base64
- libnet
- URI
- HTML-Tagset
- HTML-Parser
- Deve-Symdump
Development Information
- Mailing List: areaj-interest.
- Current status is that I'm approaching the release of version 1.0. A tarball will be available soon.
- Future plans are mainly structural - need to implement frameless functionality, and would like to templatize all pages to facilitate skins/localization.
- Certainly open to other folks who want to work on this. That's why it's Open Source.
Web Links
- areaj.sourceforge.net: The Sourceforge site for AreaJ.
- areaj.org: My personal site for areaj. You can always get the latest released source here (though SourceForge is probably faster).
- areaj.org/areaj: My personal areaj server (soon containing 1000s of photos).
- areaj.org/areaj: My development server for areaj; this will break a lot because it is the version that I'm fixing bugs and developing new features on. (Note that this currently points to the release server; this will change once I make the official 1.0 release).
- CVS: SourceForge CVS interface to areaj source.
- SourceForge Project Page: You can submit bugs, subscribe to the mailing list, browse CVS, or otherwise get into the project information here.
