Ruby & Images

[Jonathan Heinen]

Hello,

i'm just starting with ruby! =) ... i would better say with ruby on rails!
Now I want to maipulate some pictures (resize for first)! I found RMagic
and MiniMagic! .. Both make use of ImageMagic! Aren't there any
standalone ruby solutions? When not! Why not? Id should be posible to
load and manipulate the files? Or are there any preformance problems
manipulating big files?

Jonathan

 

[James H.]

My educated guess is that Rmagick and the like are required as you need
libraries and algorithms to manipulate, handle, and understand the data
held within an image, hence the need for ImageMagick. I suppose you
could do this with pure Ruby but the performance hit would be
devastating.

James H

 

[senthil.nayagam]

why do you want to reinvent the wheel again?

in my early programming career, have attempted it, but there are far
too many formats, standards and gotchas.

i am not discouraging you,

limited set of formats for specific needs is more viable, ming(flash)
and pure php/ruby pdf implementation are sucessful examples.

if you do it yourself, you can impress your friends, colleagues and
potential employers

regards
A.Senthil Nayagam

 

[lloyd]

the *magic packages you mention are specifically designed to do
something and do it well - manipulate image formats. Bearing in mind
earlier comments about reinventing the wheel it makes sense to have an
external expert to come in and do a very specific job. manipulating
binary images is far quicker in rmagick due to its use of c wrapper
libraries and although it would be brilliant to be able to include this
functionality, which is certainly possible by extending ruby with its c
interface, the trade-off would be a lot more additional code in the
core ruby language for a task that doesnt get used that often, to
compare with string, text, files manipulations to mention a few