A look at features and code of BirdShow, an open source Scala/Lift Web application for showing pictures stored on Flickr. The first user is Eleanor Briccetti Photography, http://BriccettiPhoto.com.

1. BirdShow
A Lift App for Showing Flickr Photos

2. Topics
● Organizing photos with Flickr
● Using Flickr’s Web services
● Fetching and parsing XML from Scala
● Binding an XHTML page to a code “Snippet”
with Lift
Note: BirdShow is open source, but the photos shown here are copyright Eleanor Briccetti

3. How BirdShow Came to Be
● Mom wanted a better way to show photos on
BriccettiPhoto.com
● She had many on Flickr already
● Easy to upload and organize photos on Flickr
● Flickr has Web services
● So, let’s make an open source Web app with
Scala and Lift!

4. Flickr Photo Organization
● Users
● Users have collections and sets
● Collections
● Contain other collections, and sets
● Sets
● Contain photos

5. A Quick Tour of the Result
● Home page
● Galleries
● Shows

6. Home Page
● Randomly shows one of
several photos from the
“Home” Flickr set

7. Galleries Page
● Each gallery is a Flickr set
● The sets are pulled from a collection called
“Selected”

8. A Gallery
● Selecting a gallery shows all the photos in the
gallery

9. Larger Photo
● Clicking a photo shows a larger version of the
photo

10. Shows Page
● Photos are pulled from a Flickr set, “Shows”

11. Flickr Web Services
● http://www.flickr.com/services/api/

12. Sample Flickr Results

13. BirdShow Main Parts
● Flickr.scala: Singleton interface to Flickr Web
services
● XmlFetcher.scala: makes HTTP get requests to
Flickr and loads the resulting XML
● Photo, PhotoSet.scala: hold photo info
● Snippets (Scala code to support the xhtml
pages)
● Home, Galleries, Shows
● JavaScript
● birdshow.js allows showing bigger version of photos

14. Configuration
● web.xml context-params provide the Web site
information

15. Flickr.scala

16. XmlFetcher.scala

17. Photo and PhotoSet Classes

18. Binding With a Snippet, Home Page

19. JavaScript to Show Big Pictures
Using jQuery

20. Acknowledgements
● Code reviewers
● Timothy Perrett
● Indrajit Raychaudhuri
● Alex Boisvert
● Financial support
● Eleanor Briccetti
Photography

21. Summary
● Sample implementation
● http://BriccettiPhoto.com
● Source code
● http://github.com/dcbriccetti/bird-show
● Dave Briccetti
● Twitter @dcbriccetti
● http://davebsoft.com