Some interest in the Photo Album WS

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There has been some interest by some out there in my Photo Album WS. As promised, I would delve into this into a bit more detail today.

Q: Will it be available?

A: Yes, it will be available "soon". If you're interested in helping me test it, please send me an email and we can set something up.

Q: Is this a Web Service or Web Application?

A: Well, let me explain further... Here's the general design:

Photo Album Web Service – This is the "core" of the Photo Album. The XML Web Service provides the functionality for creating categories, people, comments, and of course uploading of photos. Each of the other two parts of the Photo Album actually uses the XML Web Service to manage photos. Access to this Web Service would be given to only friends and family so that they can use the administrative tools associated with the Photo Album.

 

Photo Album Administration – This is a Windows Forms based application which allows users to organize their photos. Since this application uses the XML Web Service, only those members who are granted access privileges to are able to use it. Once they've logged in, the user is able to create categories, create people that would later be able to be associated with photos, upload photos into categories, enter descriptions of photos, create person-photo relationships, as well as post comments on any photo.

 

Photo Album Web – This is a Web Forms based application that runs in a standard web browser window. This application uses the XML Web Service with a very low privileged account just to login to the XML Web Service. On the actual web site, any visitor can view all the categories in the Photo Album and view all the photos in any category. Also, visitors can post comments associated with any photo. Here users cannot upload photos or create categories or have any other "administrative" functionality that's provided in the Windows Forms application.

 

I hope that this brief design overview better explains what I'm doing here...

 

The current status of the project is that it's generally completed. I have a few optimizations and additions left to do that I've postponed for too long now. I used to have it up on my personal web site running on my cable modem, but the problem is that my ISP kept blocking the port that I was running IIS on, so I've deicded to move it to my intranet.