Hi, I am using Appfuse for my application. Its a great starting point and thanks to all the developers. In my application, I want to add "profile picture" functionality. I looked over internet and I am kind of confused what is the best way to do it. It would be great if someone can help me here.
Here is what I found. There are two ways to store and serve images: 1. Store images in a database. Lot of links suggest that it is not the best way especially if the images are large (and many), which I think is a valid point. JFYI, I am using MySQL. 2. Store images in filesystem. Looks like this solution is not a clean solution and it might be difficult to migrate the application (in future if needed). And it is slower than the database operation. But it is still good. My first question is: which is better and scalable? Is there a good article/discussion about it? My second question is related to serving the image to jsp: even after looking at so many forums, its still not clear to me how to store and serve images in the appfuse settings (in any of the two options). Imagine an action servlet (lets call it UserAction) which serves some attributes (like user name, age, gender etc). To serve the image to jsp, can I just add new private variable like private byte[] image; and build the image when the servlet is called OR do I need another servlet? Finally, for now I am assuming that code to store images would be similar to one in FileUploadAction.java (if it is stored in filesystem). Am I right? Thanks a lot, Amit
