Book Widget -- Embedding automated photo-document publication on the web and in mobile devices

Book Widget Embedding automated photo-document publication on the web and in mobile devices E. O’Brien-Strain, A. Hunter, J. Liu, Q. Lin, D. Tretter, J. Wang, X. Zhang, and P. Wu Hewlett-Packard Labs

In which the author ... explains how to design large-scale cloud platforms for document processing

Outline
Motivation
Architectural Principles
Platform Implementation
Example Application – Facebook Photo-Books

Motivation
We have a wealth of auto-publishing algorithms
Want to provide them for third parties to use
By building a cloud-based platform that
Is flexible and programmable
Is secure and private
Is infinitely scalable
Has high availability and responsiveness
Reconciles WYSIWYG and style-driven use models

REST
Capability Security Authorization
Authentication Agnostic
Scaling: Elastic, Sessionless, noSQL, Caching
Orthogonal: UI / Content Source / Artifacts

REST
“ Representational State Transfer”
Architectural pattern for creating network APIs
All API calls are HTTP requests to some URL
GET to retrieve data from a URL
PUT to write data to a URL
POST to perform some action on a URL
DELETE to remove the data from the URL
Starting from response from an initial URL
client code finds other URLs to operate on

Capability Security Authorization
An example of a URL from our API:
http://foo.com/document/ qY9vZObN-slqsv_RWnJB4w /content/chunks.json
Has cryptographically-secure random string
If you do not know this URL there is no way to find it
Possess URL <=> Authorized to use URL
“ Moderate” level of security
Still vulnerable to network snoopers
Can use SSL to increase security

Authentication Agnostic
No concept of a “User”
Instead just store anonymous resources
Client code expected to
keep track of users and authenticate them
remember which resources belong to each user
Gives flexibility to client to use any authentication
No need for complexity of “single-sign-on”
Allows us to
avoid many security/privacy headaches
avoid complexity and cost of using SSL
have our data cached in Internet infrastructure

Scaling
Can use elastic infrastructure cloud
rapid spin-up and spin-down of virtual servers
Sessionless
Bank of web servers operating in parallel
Sequence of HTTP requests sprays out arbitrarily over multiple servers
NoSQL
Highly-distributed no-master key-value store
Caching at every level

Any Permutation of
User interface for creating documents
Web (HTML5 or Flash)
Mobile device
PC application
Where content comes from
Social network
Photo site / document storage site
PC folder
What kind of artifacts
Print at home, at retail, or at PSP
View on e-Book reader, slate, or phone

Initially Targeting Photo-Oriented Documents
Unified Model for Document + Template + Content
Content Transformation
Transactional Data
Embeddable as a Widget
Monetizable

Initial Target
Platform architected to handle a wide variety of documents
Initially handles photo-oriented documents
Such as photo-books
Can be extended to handle more text-heavy documents
Such as magazines

Unified “Document” Model
Document = content + “rendersheet”
A single “document” resource type for
User documents (content + rendersheet)
Collections of input content (just content)
Templates (just rendersheet)
Any document can be used as template for new document
Any document can by used as source of content for new document
Look-and-feel of one document can be applied to another

Algorithms
Auto-organizing algorithms using
Photo quality
Near-duplicate detection using structural similarity and time proximity
Auto-layout algorithms
BRIC (blocked recursive image composition)
START (structured layout for resizable background art)

Transactional Data
Resources are not stored indefinitely
Have an expiration date
Two top-level types of resources
Documents (composed of “Chunks”)
Artifacts

Embeddable as a Widget
Can be embedded in Web or mobile application
Third-party developer can
write their own document design user-interface
or they can use the Flash widget that we provide

Monetizable
We include features that allow for a variety of different business models
Each client application must register with us
API key and “shared secret” token
All client requests that create of modify resources must be signed with the secret
All resources are marked with the client application that created
All resources have a “time to live” before they are deleted

Example Application
Facebook Application
Built by team of outside developers
Uses our UI widget for creating and viewing photobooks
Integrates nicely into Facebook site
Leverages social connections of users
To make application more viral

Summary
Introduction
Example Application – Facebook Photo-Books

Book Widget -- Embedding automated photo-document publication on the web and in mobile devices

by Eamonn O'Brien-Strain on Jun 19, 2011

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Book Widget -- Embedding automated photo-document publication on the web and in mobile devices — Presentation Transcript

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