During a heavy coding session yesterday, we completely overhauled the old "thumbnails" module, adding new functionality that can be accessed by the web-interface as well as through our sTeam APIs (e.g. JavaSteam, PHPsTeam).
The module can be used to query images in arbitrary sizes and will automatically create scaled versions (usually for thumbnails) of the image if necessary. It will also attach the thumbnails to the image through an attribute. Think of this as a persistent thumbnail cache. Thumbnails will automatically be updated when they are queried and the image content has changed in the meantime.
This is extremely useful when you think about photographs taken by digital cameras. These images can be very large and you don't want to retrieve the full sized images over the internet to your client software if you just want to present a gallery view.
This means that you can use this module to retrieve images in arbitrary sizes from image objects in sTeam without having to care about the details. The server will (asynchronously) create the thumbnails for you and cache them, so that future queries for the same size of the image will be very fast.
I've just created a developer blog where we will be posting news about new features, important bugfixes, changes or anything we think might be interesting. We also have the mailing list, but I think that a blog can provide a more structured documentation about server development. In addition to that, we will be able to provide an rss feed for the blog, so that you can stay up to date even more comfortably.
Since this is the first entry in the blog, I'd like to point out how you can reach the developers directly:
- developers mailing list: developers@steam.upb.de
- sTeam chat:
- IRC: steam.upb.de (channel: steam, join with "/join &steam")
- Jabber: steam.upb.de (use your steam.upb.de login and password (unfortunately the server currently only provides unencrypted password authentication and connection))
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