Shocking new feature to the SNAPPS Quickr Templates
Category Quickr QuickrTemplates.com QPhotosAs you're aware, SNAPPS developed a series of templates for IBM Lotus Quickr for the initial launch of Quickr 8.0 in 2007, and has maintained and improved on them through the years. We've fixed little bugs, added a feature or two, and even added a template. All for free use by IBM customers - and IBM themselves to help demonstrate the potential of Quickr when a little high-end development work is mixed with the powerful self-service collaboration platform. It's over at QuickrTemplates.com in case you've not been there.
From the first day we've taken feature requests large and small, and implemented many of them in point releases. Some large requests, however, we shied away from due to our own bandwidth, technical challenges, or our standard fallback position, "Hey! They're free!" One of those requests was for one of the more popular templates, QPhotos, and it was to be able to process more than one photo at a time. We understood, really, totally got it. We wanted that too. But the method in place of creating thumbnails on upload was intense. We were afraid - certain - that attempting a multiple-upload facility in ways we've done before would cause all manner of problems with memory, so we collectively said - you guessed it - "Hey! They're free!"
Ring, Ring
That is, until last October 30th. I had just finished a speaking engagement at the Netherlands Lotus User Group meeting and was visiting a client in Rotterdam. I was on the tram to dinner when my phone rang ("Damn! $1.29 a minute" was all I could think...). Jeff Schick, Vice President of Social Software for Lotus was on the line. OK, I'll spend the Euro.
So Jeff had this friend, you see, who would like - you guessed it - to upload multiple photos at once to QPhotos. As I entered my by-then-usual mode of discussing the technical challenges, he told me who the friend was.
Lights. Camera.
OK, got me. I can't decline an IBM exec's request for a celebrity user of Quickr, let alone one of our templates! So, back at the ranch in Kansas, we planned. We rewrote. We kicked things. We achieved room temperature nuclear fission. But we couldn't deal with the memory issue. Then it hit us - could we leverage Viktor's REST API work on PandaBear, the Adobe Air app for Quickr? And we were off. Three weeks later, we produced a solution that lets him upload 100+ photos at a time to QPhotos, with no code changes at all to QPhotos! And any updates to the Air app, of course, are automatically pushed down to the application. Air is like that. It's cool.
Here's how it works:
Viktor created a subset version of PandaBear cleverly named "PhotoLoadr for Lotus Quickr," which has one goal in life. Upload photos to a QPhotos place. Just like PandaBear, it lets you set up a connection to a server, browse places, pick one, then upload. Now - you have to know it's a QPhotos place, we didn't make it idiot-proof. If you upload somewhere else it just, well, uploads. Once all the photos are uploaded (during which time you can go to lunch, get coffee, or play with your Twitter tweets), the PhotoLoadr app makes a silent call to an agent sitting in a new database you place on the server- brain child of SNAPPS' Jerald Mahurin - passing it the name of the place it just uploaded files to. The agent then takes over, processing each found photo one at a time, just like it used to manually, but in a batch mode. After a few seconds, a minute, whatever, you have all your photos uploaded, thumbnails created, and ready for the much faster process of just filling out metadata. That's still one at a time until a future Quickr version which will accept metadata through the REST APIs, but that's another story. Believe me, it makes a major difference in overall time! Our benchmark tests on a crappy server give us 8-10 images processed per second.
Shhhhhhh...
We tested it, fixed a couple bugs, delivered it, and silence ensued. The kind of silence that makes you wonder if you crashed a server, or if everything's just going OK. But it turns out it was just holiday and LS-prep silence. On Tuesday night at Lotusphere I saw Jeff in Kimonos, said hello, and had my answer. The hug and 10x repeated "Thank You!" said it all. He even did the "we're not worthy" bow. How embarrassing. Apparently, it's working great and while we (nervous developers) still have scalability reservations, they've been uploading in batches of more than 100 going gangbusters.
Very pleased that this all worked out, so much so that I'm happy to be placing the code on QuickrTemplates.com for free today, for all to enjoy.
Oh - I almost forgot!
That friend of Jeff's, Notes user, Quickr fan, and QPhotos fan, and who I got permission to reference just today, is radio personality Howard Stern.
Enjoy the code, folks!
