Comments on: Packaging images in your code

By: Vik

Vik — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 17:38:15 +0000

This reminds me of those old x86 Assembler “intros” put out by the pirate groups. The whole thing would be packaged in one tiny EXE or COM file, with the GIF image completely inlined. The purpose was to make it easy to transport the intro across the wire so more people would see it — having external GIFs, or a zipped EXE plug GIF would certainly reduce viewership.

I don’t see how those ideas translate to webapps. I mean they’re supposed to be centrally hosted. Plus, wouldn’t it be more beneficial to allow people to change the PNG if they wanted… easily?

I certainly don’t think this calls for a generalization of JSP vs PHP programmers, because I’ve seen some pretty whacky things being done with JSP as well. What I do see is that a JSP person would be more likely to do this hack in an external class (with some “framework”) because that’s the prevailing mindset.

By: Lee

Lee — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 17:46:19 +0000

Dion – I think you’ve touched on one of the core differences between PHP and Java developers. PHP developers will do what seems cool, whereas Java developers (generally) do what works, regardless of its “cool” factor.

Or maybe its just that I perceive Java developers to be more pragmatic? I don’t know… I’ve done both camps, and now reside in the Java camp – I’ve seen the error of my ways, and try to educate those that haven’t yet seen the light, but sometimes its difficult…

By: Dion

Dion — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 18:11:36 +0000

Lee -

I know :) I thought that someone with a ukonline account would get the sarcasm of the thing ;)

Dion

By: Lee

Lee — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 16:52:21 +0000

on what weird ass planet is that clever? ever heard of maintainability?

besides, its a CPU/RAM hit to access your script and chuck out the code for the image. If you simply put it in the equivalent of your htdocs dir its a lot less burden. Guess you aren’t envisioning your app ever being successful, but then again with techniques like that, I can understand why ;)

By: Pramod Biligiri

Pramod Biligiri — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 11:43:15 +0000

I think base64 encoding of images is popular on the web. I’ve seen some Javascript code and Greasemonkey scripts use this to store images.

By: Elliot Anderson

Elliot Anderson — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 07:45:52 +0000

Been there, done that :P

I got the idea from a little script I found once by CeleronDude that did something similar. Most of the time I would just use an absolute link to the images off my server but if the app needs to run on its own then I would package it into the script.