Online image editing app

[jmaccan]

Hi all. I am new here, I appreciate any help that I may get.

I am looking at developing a web app, well, Im going to get someone else to code it because ive been out of the game for a while. Im going to be planning and designing the app and was hoping to get some advice regarding which technologies would be best suited.

The app is designed for businesses and will contain a lot of standard functionality such as customer management tools and an inventory which are obviously not going to be a problem to implement. However, I also want to develop a tool that I want to integrate into this web app, but im not sure yet how im going to do this. This is where im hoping you guys could offer some advice.

This ‘tool’ is fundamentally an image editing tool which has interactions with a database. I want my users to be able to load images from a local machine into the drawing tool on the server. Once the image(s) are loaded, I want the users to be able to draw objects(and move them around) on top of this image, objects that represent items that are stored in a table in the database. As the objects/items are drawn, I want a list of ‘items used’ to grow in another table in the database.

Is it possible to build such a tool inside my web application without using Flash or a java applet?


What kind of technologies should i be looking at. I have been learning about Google’s app engine, and wonder if using this infrastructure and the integrated technologies could work, as app engine does seem to suit the needs of this web project as a whole, in terms of scalability and cost etc.

I hope my question is clear. If anyone can offer advice that would be awesome. Thanks

[Ducky]

I personally think flash would be ideal.

[Ed]

Flash would work, but the current trend is veering away from being stuck to something like that.

There is a new language based on JavaScript called Objective-J (similar Objective-C) which makes it very easy to make desktop calibre applications. There is a framework that has got brilliant reviews, called Cappuccino for it Objective-J. 280slides, a web app for presentations, was built with Cappuccino, and it replicates the functionality of Keynote, a native application on Apple Macs. You can view how rich it is here.

Looking at the features of 280slides, you could easily do what you want to do without using Flash.

Regards,
Ed.