MoPhotos and MoBloggin’

I’ve been wanting to upload photos to my blog from my Nokia 6620. I first decided to tackle this using Symbian but realized that it would take me ten times longer than writing it using J2ME. Don’t get me wrong, I love Symbian and the power it brings to development, but it’s extremely complicated. I’m past the days of taking the most complicated approach to solve a problem. Luckily I found that the mobile media API is supported on my device. This was exciting news since I figured I could get a proof of concept working in a matter of nights. This past weekend I was able to get the device code to capture the photo and send it to my server via HTTP post. The next step was to then write a Java servlet to handle the input stream and write the image to disk.

I was able to bang out the servlet in a matter of a couple hours and was pretty pumped about this. It turned out that the servlet or device (not exactly sure) was unable to handle the stream property. So after some digging around I learned that I might need to Base64 encode the image before posting to the server and then let the servlet decode it. This was a mind numbing process that I finally got to work, definitely LONG overdue.

So I’m now able to take photos from anywhere and upload them to the server over my GPRS connection (I’m probably Cingular’s #1 customer right now). The next piece was getting them integrated with my blog. On the blog index page you’ll see the most recent photo taken with my device. I’m only sending them up at 320×240 res, but plan on publishing the app and making this user configurable. The photo is displayed via a simple ajax call since it integrates nicely with my blog. I’ll be working on the Ruby on Rails piece to create a nice photo album to support the uploaded photos.

If you’ve read any of my previous posts you’ll know that I’m literally all over the place. This is definitely the case but as I further my development and investigation of technologies I can see something start to formalize. Please stay tuned and I promise not to let you down!

One last note, I’ll be working on getting my Bluetooth GPS integrated with the MoPhoto app so users will be able to upload photos as well as GPS coords. I think you know where I’m heading with this but I’ll leave it up to your imagination. If you have any suggestions I would love to hear them.

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