Managed to get OSCache and Dynamic Image Generation going with RIFE. Found a slight issue with GIF (damn you patents), but worked it out. Now I can generate, scale, cache, and serve out Images (Jpeg, Gif, Png, whatever else I want to integrate) on the fly with RIFE.

I'll try to write up an article tomorrow, after I finish my reading for class, on how to setup this system. Bevin helped me with some of the finer details. The beauty of the way RIFE handles dynamic content generation is you can feed ANYTHING directly to a client without temp files, or swapping to disk at all, everything can be fed through memory. As a matter of fact, Bevin showed me a shot of a video streaming live to a client without the need to hold much of anything in memory (gotta get some more info on that one).

Ok, I'll try to do a better job explaining this tomorrow. However, let me say the system is amazingly versitile and the ability to generate, cache, and serve out dynamic content (note: without temp files, without database backends, automatic expiration based on usage, etc.) opens the door to amazing possibilities. How many of us have worked at companies that needed dynamic document generation.

I remember one company where they pulled the values out of a COBOL database, fed it to a PDF construction system, it got stored to a temp directory on the server, then it was served out to the requester. The system worked, but whenever there was an issue a temp file was left on disk, when someone else wanted the document (same values) another one was generated, stored, etc.

Anyway, hopefully more on this tomorrow.

Cheers,
Tyler

So RIFE... It's genius. Bevin has done amazing things I must say. Like I said in my first post, I'm a law student architecting a product for a company in China. I've worked with the Web, Wireless, and Java for I don't even know how many years now and it's wonderful to have a framework like RIFE.

1) It's still in development: some people don't like this, but to me it's a must. It allows new additions, improvements, etc.

2) Bevin is a great guy: another must. He's helpful, available, and cares about his product and users.

3) It doesn't follow norms about the web, instead it makes improvements on it. Things like CRUD, Continuations, CMS integration, new templating concepts, all genius, new, and exactly what all software should strive for. RIFE isn't re-inventing; it's changing the way we build a website.

4) Open source: a plus. I'm not a zealot about OS, but it has some great advantages. I can tweak the code, remove things I don't need, add little hacks here and there if needed. While RIFE doesn't need a lot of hacking, when I need to tweak I can. The code is clean and well maintained.

I'll try to compile some of the things I've noticed from digging around the docs, examples, videos, IRC, and mailing lists and post it up so if anyone runs into a similar problem it'll be in one spot.

Cheers,
Tyler