Re: dynamic website with Gempak

Chirag,

I do many images from cgi.
In regard to images, if you expect a large number of requests for
non-similar images , then you can create them dynamically and then
instead of putting on your web site for viewing with the
normal <IMG SRC=""> command, where you will have to maintain the image
for some period of time- you can send them within the page using
a mime type of image/gif and immediately delete the file.

I have a short program for putting the mime block in a web page
but it is easy to do in perl or php as well. The advantage here I see
is that you won't risk filling up disk space if your image creation gets
unexpectedly punded on, and, you don't have to have a directory
on your web server writable by the web server (web, nobody) process
since the dynamic page is built and streamed without storing on disk.

Some examples here are the rtstats web pages under:
www.unidata.ucar.edu/sortare/idd/rtstats
and radar images under
motherlode.ucar.edu/unidata/images/nids/gdradr.html

If needed, I can put together some web examples for these scripts,

Steve Chiswell
Unidata User Support

On Wed, 29 Mar 2006, Shukla, Chirag wrote:

> Hi Steve,
>
> Hope you are doing excellent.
>
> I was thinking of using Gempak as a tool for dynamic
> interaction/visualization on websites. Here is what I was thinking:
> A user submits a form after choosing a date, server side script grabs
> data from a database to create a text file followed by calling a .csh
> file. The .csh file creates a .gem file and invokes sfmap to create a
> temporary image. This image is rendered back to the webpage. Error
> checks can be placed in the server side script. Temporary images can be
> flushed off every few hours.
>
> Someone might have tried this already. Do you think this is a practical
> approach?
>
> Thanks. Have a great time.
>
> Sincerely,
> Chirag Shukla
> South Dakota State University
>