HW10: URL Fetch, Blobs, and Images APIs

So far in your app the images added to the pins have remained at the original host. All you have been doing is adding img tags whose src attribute points to the original image. For this homework you will change your webapp so that it downloads the images from the host server to your server, stores them as blobs in your database, calculates their original width and height, and then serves these images from your server.

That is, GET /pin/123.jpg now returns the actual image (a jpeg file, you can assume that all images added are jpegs for this homework) of the pin 123. You would have added that image to your datastore when the user initially did a POST /pin to add the pin.

Also, you must store in your datastore the width and height (in pixels) of the original image. You will be using these numbers in the next homework.

Required Reading

In order to do this you will need to use a couple of new service from the app engine:

The URL Fetch API allows your python code (server) to issue GET requests to other servers. This is what you will use to fetch the images from the other servers.

Once you have the image you can simply use the BlobProperty type to store it in your database. This article on Serving Dynamic Images gives you step by step instructions on how to store and then serve images in the app engine.

Finally, you need to store the width and height of the image. In order to determine those number you will need to use the Images API. These are a set of python calls that let you get information about and manipulate images.

As usual, push it to your github repo by Monday, November 12 @9am.