Technology behind Art (or, how I built 'Mosaic Art By Siofra') (ASP.NET, Atlas Control Toolkit, RSS Toolkit, Flickr.NET)
Mosaic Art by Siofra is a simple website built with ASP.NET that incorporates some interesting features, such as web service communications, an RSS feed, and quite a few AJAX tricks. Here are a few of the technologies that allowed me to create the site very quickly, and without writing any javascript myself. The entire process took just over a weekend, and was done using freely available tools and libraries.
Atlas. The Atlas framework is used all over the site! On the main page, I use the UpdatePanel control to perform a partial update when the visitor causes a postback. The UpdateProgress control gives the visitor a visual indication that an asynchronous operation is occurring. To see how you can accomplish this yourself, watch Scott's Todo-List demo. Get Atlas.
Atlas Control Toolkit - ReorderList control and Collapsable Panel. The image above is of the ReorderList control in the Admin section of the site. ReorderList is a data-bound control that includes an ItemTemplate (pictured), an EditItemTemplate and the ability to do drag-and-drop reordering. In addition, the CollapsablePanel control (pictured here) lets you expand and contract portions of a page. Get the Atlas Control Toolkit and maybe even contribute to it!
RSS Toolkit for ASP.NET. The website sports an RSS feed which is automatically updated when new artworks are added. DmitryR's RSS Toolkit for ASP.NET generates a HttpHandler that helps you create a feed from any data source. You're about 7 lines of code away from adding an RSS feed to your site. Get the RSS Toolkit.
Flickr.NET. The photos of the mosaics are stored on Flickr, and I talk to Flickr using its web service API. (Each mosaic is identified by a unique Flickr username + Flickr tag combination.) Sam Judson's Flickr.NET library makes the communcation with Flickr possible. He recently updated it to run in Medium Trust, which is great news for ASP.NET 2.0 users. Get Flickr.NET.
Atlas, the Atlas Control Toolkit, the RSS Toolkit for ASP.NET and Flickr.NET are all free to download and use, and you can bring them together using the Visual Web Developer Express Edition environment.
(I built Mosaic Art By Siofra and its data layer exclusively with Visual Web Developer Express Edition and SQL Server Express Edition, and I used SQL Server Management Studio Express to export my local database to SQL 2000 scripts for hosting online. And, I have to say, even though a lot of these tools (such as Atlas) are still in Community Tech Preview mode -- I enjoyed the experience!)
Comments
Anonymous
July 05, 2006
yep...i think rss has made every1z life just so simple...Anonymous
August 16, 2006
I've just updated the Mosaic Art by Siofra site to the July CTP of Atlas.  It's a simple site built...Anonymous
January 15, 2007
Over the holidays, I built a data-driven website for a family member. It gave me a chance to exploreAnonymous
June 09, 2009
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