Making a name for online image search
Polar Rose’s unique technology gives greater meaning and context to digital photos by allowing them to be indexed online just like text documents. The company developer user friendly, fun, useful, transparent applications that have evolved from computer vision research at the Universities of Lund and Malmo in Sweden. Polar Rose is an active member of the open source community.
Challenges: Polar Rose delivers a Firefox plug-in capable of scanning and passing photographic information to back-end servers. A vibrant community of users tag names on these photos and are the driving force behind identification.
In order to fuel both community growth and indexing capacities, Polar Rose required a scalable two-way dynamic communication solution. To meet its exact needs, it also needed expert advice on implementation and customization.
Solution: Polar Rose now uses the Hightide open source distribution of Jetty from Webtide on its servers. By using the Bayeux protocol for two-way communication implemented in the Cometd project together with Java by Webtide, developers can now use efficient and secure channel-based message system.
Issues such as browser connection limits and sharing are transparently handled by Cometd. Jetty scales to host the communications using its asynchronous capabilities to optimally manage system resources. Add Webtide’s Developer Advice and Production Support and Polar Rose now has an economical, small footprint, high performance, open source infrastructure.
Why Polar Rose Chose Webtide: “Hightide currently provides the industry’s best Cometd support, which Polar Rose uses to get real-time feedback in its Firefox extension. Hightide also integrates many standard Java technologies in a simple lean and mean package which has removed the need for the more traditional fat application servers that one would otherwise use. Because it integrates so well in the development process and tools, it has allowed us to be significantly more agile in implementing new functionality to our rather complex solution.” -Stefan Arentz, System Architect, Polar Rose.