Image Gallery features

For an easier understanding of the possibilities of this gallery and to understand the new terms you should look at the Concepts page of this web site.

General

  • fully JSR-168 compliant (currently supports Liferay, but only minore changes are necessary to use it within other Portal environments)
  • extensive use of AJAX for low page load times
  • can not only display images but also every content imaginable with slight changes
  • can be connected to nearly every content providing system (e.g. Alfresco, file system, ftp, only to list a few)
  • uses modern frameworks like Spring, JSF (ICEFaces), and JPA and build tools like Maven for easy adaption, extension and fast and clear development

View

Displaying in general

A big effort was made to allow on the fly updating of content, which means that in almost all cases a user only sees data which does exist. If updates within the admin section of the portlet are made they are immediately reflected within the view section of the same instance. New instances of the gui (e.g. in another browser window) cannot yet be updated.
This is because it is currently not possible to instantiate backing beans as singletons. It would be with the help of Spring, but Spring does not work in this case. For details on this visit the Spcp7 Blog at http://spcp7.wordpress.com .
Although the GUI is working, it should be considered proof of concept. At the moment it only provides simple functionality. To be able to compete with other image galleries further features have to be implemented. Refer to Missing Features for details.

Displaying of content folders

The view component can display a list of content folders and the content below them.

Navigating through the content

Pagination and simple navigating through the view without a complete page refresh is supported.

Administration

Administration of Content Provider properties

The image gallery has a default set of properties but a content provider can also add special properties itself. The user interface can administrate those properties independent of the underlying content provider and of the fact which properties it defines.

Adding and removing of content folders

Content folders can be added and removed easily via a clear tree view.

Browsing of path independent of the underlying content provider

Another innovative feature is the fact that the GUI does not need to be changed for browsing through a tree like structure (file system like with folders and documents). It just works out of the box because of the underlying clearly defined API.

Extensibility

The architecture is very flexible because of the stringent enforcement of the "separation of concerns" paradigm. The view component is completely separated from the Image Gallery API and a content provider is separated from the content provider registry which for example allows completely flexible decisions concerning the architecture of the following components:

  • the Content Provider itself
  • the Properties of each content provider