Should I deploy all my images?

[Cory Max]

Hi Everyone,

I hope this is the right forum. I am a new(er) Java Web developer and have developed a web application for work. A new requirement of our application is to have pictures displayed of all of our parts (in the web application). There are approximately 100 mb of small images. My question is:

Should I put all of these images in my deployment and make the ear file 105 mb's? How else would I go about doing this? Is this standard practice or is there another way/place to store the images to keep them out of the deployment.

Any good information would be appreciated.

Thanks again for all your help.

Cheers,

Cory

[Chetan Parekh]

You should always have all components of you web application in your deployment file – this is the general practice.

But how come the size of images is 100 MB? What is the type of images? What is the size of deployment file with and without images?

[Jesper de Jong]

You do not want to hard-code all the images in your application. What happens if your company starts selling a new part, or if an image of an existing parts needs to be updated? You don't want to modify, build and re-deploy your EAR file everytime that happens.

You can put them anywhere in the file system and make a servlet that can serve the images (the servlet would read them from the directory where you put them), or you could even put the images in a database and make a servlet that retrieves them from there. I guess you already have a database that contains all the information about the parts you're selling?
[ October 13, 2005: Message edited by: Jesper de Jong ]

[Chetan Parekh]

Originally posted by Jesper de Jong:
You do not want to hard-code all the images in your application. What happens if your company starts selling a new part, or if an image of an existing parts needs to be updated? You don't want to modify, build and re-deploy your EAR file everytime that happens.

You can put them anywhere in the file system and make a servlet that can serve the images (the servlet would read them from the directory where you put them), or you could even put the images in a database and make a servlet that retrieves them from there. I guess you already have a database that contains all the information about the parts you're selling?

[ October 13, 2005: Message edited by: Jesper de Jong ]

Jesper de Jong

You have shown me new way of thinking.
[ October 13, 2005: Message edited by: Chetan Parekh ]

[Cory Max]

Thanks to both of you.

In reply to Chetan Parekh's question:

"But how come the size of images is 100 MB? What is the type of images? What is the size of deployment file with and without images?"
- We have 1000 pictures of parts, all jpegs of about 100k each. Deploymen ear currently is 3.5 MB's.

In reploy to Jesper de Jong's reply:

Thanks so much. This totally makes sense and I appreciate the response. Any sample code would be appreciated (if you have some kicking around), but I think I could probably get it working on my own.

Cheers to both of you!

- Cory Max