Advice on sending images to clients over network

[Bjoern Schliessmann]

Frank Millman wrote:

> My question is, what is the best way to get the image to the
> client? 

IMHO, HTTP would be most painless. Either incorporate a little HTTP
server into your server application, or use a seperate daemon and
let the server only output HTTP links.

> My third thought was to set up a separate 'image server'. It would
> be another server program written in Python, listening on its own
> port number, waiting for a client request for a particular image.
> It would know where to find it, read it in, and send it to the
> client. Then all the client needs to know is the ip address and
> port number.

See above -- you could also write your own HTTP server. Best using
Twisted or something of similar high level. Why make yourself work
developing such a system when somebody already did it for you?

> I guess the point of all this rambling is that my thought process
> is leading me towards my third option, but this would be a bit of
> work to set up, so I would appreciate any comments from anyone who
> has been down this road before - do I make sense, or are there
> better ways to handle this?

For minimum additional work, I'd use some lightweight http daemon,
like lighttpd ot thttpd. Then your server can pass links like
<http://yourserver.example.com/images/thingy1.jpeg> and the clients
can use well-tested standard library routines to retrieve the
image.

Regards,


Björn

-- 
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Backbone adjustment