tinySG Asset Management
Friends of tinySG,
with more and more demo datasets being developed for tinySG it starts to
become a challenge managing all the different textures, icons, datasets
and licenses. Sure, you can use e.g. a svn repository to maintain versions
and collections of files, but it really creates issues when meta information
like licenses for individual textures has to be managed as well.
This is the point where tsgAssetMgr enters the game. Using a LAMP system
(Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP), it has been quiet easy to implement a
small database with a web frontend, providing services similar to the
windows explorer:
- Easy-to-use Web frontend, with preview function
- Maintain a tree of categories
- Network-transparent access: Up- and download datasets and other assets.
- Attach arbitrary Metadata to files and categories
- Browse and search the database
Being composed of just a bunch of html pages and PHP scripts, the
system is quite flexible and easy to extend. In fact, it could easily be
converted into a ticket system or a collaborative task management tool.
Key to this flexibility is the metadata relation of the underlying
database and the ability to build arbitrary, tree-like hierarchies of
information.
This web server is missing a MySQL database, so for now tinyAssetMgr cannot
run as a live-demo here. Furthermore, session management, access rights and
user roles would have to be implemented before running in an offensive
environment like the Internet (this site experiences up to ten attacks per month
even though there is nothing to steal. I cannot understand this - must be
a modern form of vandalism). But this is something definitely worth working on.
Although tsgAssetMgr is already useful on its own, it has been designed with
yet another major goal in mind: It shall serve as the database backend of
a streaming server, allowing to navigate through tinySG scenes over the
Web. But that is a topic for another update to this site coming soon.
Stay tuned,
Christian
Acknowledgements:
tinyAssetManager uses icons
- under the Creative Commons license, created by Barry Mieny.
- licensed as freeware, created by Midtone Design Studio and Sean Gakusei.
Thanks, guys. Great work!
|
