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The End of the Gallery

Again, end of the gallery, not the end of the galaxy.

No apocalypse now.

By end of the gallery, I mean I've finished up the backend of the gallery tool.

As outlined in my last entry, I decided to build a PHP/MySQL backend (uses Perl/flat files for front end). While it was a relatively straight-forward process, it was more work than I anticipated - isn't it always?

And the [intentional] use of MySQL was a bit of a hindrance, but I wanted to use MySQL because it's the predominant OSS DB out there, and I need more practice on it. And this project is pretty much a good fit for MySQL: Nothing too involved, just some selects and inserts. And all locally, so it's a no-brainer (yes, perfect for me).

Here's how the backend project ended up:

• Add/edit gallery page (all at once)


• Edit image name/desc (all at once)


• Add new image/reload existing image (processes and moves file to local and remote server)


• Gallery-to-Image mapping (gallery at a time)


• Include file for header (menu/DB connectivity etc)


• Processing page to generate all necessary TXT files for front end

I used the same CSS sheet as used for the front end (with some back-end classes additions tacked on), so the UI is the same and that's one less file to maintain (good...).

As far as the database goes, it's pretty much a trivial exercise - see the code below:


As you can see, three tables, the last of which is just a mapping table between the first two, so any picture can belong to any number of galleries.

Lots of busy work, but - for the most part - nothing earthshaking.

One of the nice aspects of this project was getting more experience with PHP and files - I've done it before, many times, but always separated by large chunks of time. A refresher is always nice.

Actually, it was a nice refresher in PHP, in general. I've been working more with Perl and ColdFusion recently, and I keep forgetting about how much I like PHP. And the more of it I learn, the more there is to like.

One new aspect of PHP - for me - was the FTP tools. I'd just never had the occasion to need them in PHP.

When I mentally architected this tool and decided on PHP, I didn't even know if PHP supported FTP - I knew that it must, and that it probably wasn't a hack, but I didn't know. I just assumed that it did, and - if not - I'd just run exec() in PHP to either a shell or Perl script to do the FTP business.

Thankfully, PHP's FTP tools are as I expected: Pretty extensive and pretty damn accessible.

The two complaints I have with PHP's FTP functions are the following:

• The syntax is always - GET or PUT - remote, local. I am used to - Unix based - source [space] target. I was hosed on this for about a half hour, until I actually RTFM. Little weird to me, but consistent across the PHP FTP functions, and consistency is good.


• I'm probably missing something, but I don't see support for MGET or MPUT - each GET or PUT is discrete, as far as I can tell (and, here, I have RTFM). Not a problem in this case for me, as I'm looping through galleries, creating them and uploading them. So it's a one-at-a-time thing, anyway. But what if I wanted to upload all the JPEGs in a directory? I can't do a "mput *.jpg ." type thing, as one can with most CLIs. Have to grab list and loop. OK, but still would be nice....maybe in v5

Overall, the Gallery Project was a blast, and it's turned out well.

I need to do some tweaking - for example, build an FTP function for my MPUT-type needs - but it's pretty solid and the damn thing actually works!

Time to scan in more pics....