Setu Garg's Homepage

SimpleViewer is a great tool to create your own image galleries. The interface is smooth,  intuitive and user friendly.

I have been using SimpleViewer for a while. I used to generate its gallery.xml file manually. There are ways to generate the xml using Picasa and other tools, but then you need to have the images on your desktop. I have my photos on photobucket . The best part with photobucket is that it offers static URLs for all your images. So, you can download your images in full size from anywhere. Also, there is a handy Windows XP publisher plugin available to easily upload your photos in your account 🙂

The problem was to automatically create Simpleviewer’s gallery.xml from photobucket static links. I could not find any tool available on the internet which could help me in doing so. Hence, I decided to write a tool myself :).

Being a Java programmer, I built the tool as a Java class. The tool worked smoothly. Then I thought of making it available for everyone through the internet. I created a HTML form to call a JSP which used this class to generate the xml and print it on screen. I tried uploading these in my account on myjavaserver.com but they did not work. I then merged the JSP code and the JAVA code into a servlet and thne tried to deploy it on myjavaserver.com. But all efforts went in gutter. Actually, I think its fair. The procedure to get a myjavaserver.com account is not easy. How can we expect the deployment procedure to be easy ?

So, I shifted to the server side scripting language of the heaven: PHP. I referred to w3schools.com and php.net just to learn the required stuff. And yes, I have the tool up and running at http://www.setugarg.in/SimpleViewerXMLGenerator.

Please use it to create your own image galleries. Feel free to pass this URL to your frinds and family. Its the basic thing (kind of beta) right now. I will be enhancing its functionality as and when I get time. People who are wandering over the internet for such a tool, please accept it as my chritmas gift to you :).

And yes, please mails your comments/suggestions/bugs to SimpleViewerXMLGenerator [at] setugarg [dot] com