Client: Lightbox Network
Role: Lead Flex Developer
Technologies:
- Flex
- PHP
- MySQL
- AMFPHP
- BlazeDS
- ImageMagick
Need:
Lightbox Network is an industry leader for professional digital photography workflow, with clients such as NBC Universal, New York Daily News, MillerCoors, Getty Images, Hallmark Channel, Time, and Nickelodeon. They needed a web-based application to allow professional photographers and editors to collaborate remotely.
Summary:
The Live Media Desk application (see overview video) enables real-time collaboration of photo shoots between photographers and editors. As photographers upload images, they become immediately available to editors working remotely to filter, adjust, rank, edit metadata, and forward images. With Live Media Desk, images can go from a photographer’s camera at an event to the desk of an editor, then published to a public web site within minutes.
I was the lead Flex architect and developer for this multi-year project, The biggest challenge was to make the web-based program perform like a desktop application.
To accomplish this, I designed and implemented the following strategies:
- Image and data caching to minimize server round trips
- Priority-based request queuing to manage all HTTP/HTTPS calls, including images and AMFPHP function calls
- Heuristic-based image preloading to anticipate user needs and produce a seamless user experience
- Real-time image filtering in the Flash run-time to match server-side image filtering done with ImageMagick
- Breaking the application into modules with run-time configuration and dependency management
- Real-time updating system using custom messaging delivered through BlazeDS connecting to PHP through STOMP, JMS and ActiveMQ