[vox] Open Source E-Card Software

[Bill Kendrick]

On Sun, Nov 20, 2011 at 04:16:36PM -0800, Kevin Schultz wrote:
>    Hi Jeff,
>    I am thinking along the line of something I can install on a hosted LAMP
>    server, to allow people to choose from among an album of images to
>    personalize and forward.

Yeah, you'll probably want either something like GIMP running as
a server, or tools like ImageMagick or NetPBM tools, or something newer
and cooler (Processing? :) )

You could also probably have some fun with HTML5, <canvas>, and all that
other newfangled stuff, but then you'd be somewhat restricting the audience.
(You'd have a lot less 'work' to do on the server end, and a lot less
temporary storage to deal with, compared to constructing & storign bitmaps,
and showing them to the recipients.)

This kind of stuff could also take advantage of cloud computing, like
Amazon S3 for storage, and Amazon EC2 for doing the dirty work (and letting
you scale it up).  They also have some DB products.

  http://aws.amazon.com/

And Amazon's obviously not the only cloud player in town.

-bill!