Hi, I wish to create a browser-based image editor with GWT. It need not be anything fancy; image cropping and text insertion (with ability to choose size, font, color) should be enough for a first pass. Other functionality can come later.
1. Is there something out there that already does this so I don't re- invent the wheel? If not, then how would you recommend I go about it? Here are a few ideas I found from old threads (but no thread really provided a thorough answer or discussion): For the editing panel itself, use (a) an AbsolutePanel since it lets you position elements at will, (b) use a Canvas and draw everything manually, or (c) use SVG and forget about IE. I'm actually not sure about the differences between (b) and (c), so if someone could clear that up it'd be great. In terms of actually generating the image, I could (a) grab the HTML from the AbsolutePanel and create an image from it using Flying Saucer [1] (presumably on the server) or some other library (worst case scenario, I think you can use Swing to draw the HTML and then save it as an image); (b) just save the image if it was drawn manually; or (c) send some xml representing the SVG image to the server and process it / save it (again, I'm not really sure of what I'm talking about here). Since I'm not familiar AT ALL with vector drawing and I don't require any fancy controls, I'm leaning towards AbsolutePanel + HTML-to-image conversion. My concern is that the HTML might render differently on my user's browser and on the server. Even if the discrepancies are minor, that could piss off the users very much when they don't get what they see. 2. If you've done HTML -> image conversions before, should I be concerned about this? (This is a new area to me). If so, how can I help it/minimize discrepancies? 3. What about the CSS styling? I can get the HTML for the stuff inside the AbsolutePanel, but I'll also have to get the CSS somehow, which is possibly dynamically generated. How can I achieve this? 4. Is there a way to generate the image on the client? I'm thinking of giving them a preview of the generated image so that even if there are discrepancies, they can see what they're gonna get before they get it... However I'd like to save server calls if possible. Thanks!! [1] https://xhtmlrenderer.dev.java.net/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Web Toolkit" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-web-toolkit?hl=en.
