Image manipulation

Hi,

I'm a beginner who's trying to use Squeak to do some image
manipulation at the back end. It's part of a Webapp for
medical images (the Web part might be handled by Seaside). I really
like Seaside, but I have not decided because I'm concerned about
image manipulation in Squeak. So here's the issue:

1. I have not found a squeak package that does something
similar to ImageMagick. If there's no such facility in Squeak,
how can I "call" an external library such as ImageMagick
from the Squeak image?

2. If there is something equivalent, I'm still concerned about
the performance (the Webapp will be heavily used).

Could anyone give me some advice on this matter? Thanks
a lot for your help.

G.M.
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G M wrote:
There is a Squeak package which may do what you want:

http://map1.squeakfoundation.org/package/da65281d-547e-44d7-a0cd-1ef4c17dc8c8

Otherwise you can use ImageMagick either by executing it's various
command line tools.  For an example of running a command line app look
at the UnixProcess class side method called testRunCommand.  It is
fairly straightforward to execute an external command from inside Squeak.

Finally if executing from the command line takes too long you might
consider building a simple C interface for the ImageMagick tools you
need and then calling that interface via FFI ("Foreign Function
Interace" -- call C functions from Squeak).  It is certainly possible to
use the ImageMagick libraries directly from Squeak but writing a simple
wrapper usually makes it easier.  There are lots of examples of FFI in
the Squeak image.  Have a look at the Wiki page for more details (don't
know if it is up to date though):

http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/1414

Finally if FFI proves to be too slow you can go even deeper and write a
plugin.  I don't have a good link for this...never done it myself.

Hope that helps!


David

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David Shaffer wrote:
> http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/1414
> Finally if FFI proves to be too slow you can go even deeper and write a
> plugin.  I don't have a good link for this...never done it myself.
>  
Some help for plugins:

http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/1448
http://bike-nomad.com/squeak/writingPlugins.html
http://goran.krampe.se/blog/Squeak/vmmaker.rdoc
http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/356

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On Tue, Sep 19, 2006 at 02:48:24PM -0400, David Shaffer wrote:
>
> Otherwise you can use ImageMagick either by executing it's various
> command line tools.  For an example of running a command line app look
> at the UnixProcess class side method called testRunCommand.  It is
> fairly straightforward to execute an external command from inside Squeak.

Since this is on the beginners' list, I'll mention that UnixProcess
is part of the OSProcess package, so you need to load it from SqueakMap.
You should also load CommandShell at the same time, because it has
additional help for running external programs from Squeak.

Dave
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