Image Gallery, javascript and xml?

[mattgaunt]

Hey everyone

Im looking into making an image gallery in javascript (Use jQuery to add some nice effects) but I dont want the images to hardcoded, I was thinking of using an xml file to read in the number of albums and images and info accordingly to then generate the javascript gallery, but is this heading in a wrong direction?

I was just wondering if I could get someone elses input.

Many thanks
Matt

 

[SoapSurgeon]

That sounds like a nice project to me. You thought about other metadata in the XML or are you simply storing a list of images?

 

[Augmented]

Any particular reason for the choice of XML? How about using a more lightweight format like JSON?

 

[mattgaunt]

No particular reason for xml other than it seems to be able to do what i wanted which in xml would be expressed as:

<album>
    <title>Album 1</title>
    <direc>/images/gallery/000/</direc>
    <image>
        <filename>000.jpg</filename>
        <descrip>Image 000 descrip</descrip>
    </image>
    <image>
        <filename>001.jpg</filename>
        <descrip>Image 001 descrip</descrip>
    </image>
</album>

<album>
    <title>Album 2</title>
    <direc>/images/gallery/001/</direc>
    <image>
        <filename>000.jpg</filename>
        <descrip>Image 000 descrip</descrip>
    </image>
    <image>
        <filename>001.jpg</filename>
        <descrip>Image 001 descrip</descrip>
    </image>
</album>

And basically Im thinking of making this be updated not so much by manually adding in the xml file but storing this info in a database and then when ever the album is updated, it updates the database and then prints out a new xml file for the javascript file to use.

Im fairly new to server side programming, but Im just trying to think of the easiest way of achieving maintainability and flexibility and think this might be the right way.

Do you think JSON would be a much more suitable way to go?

Anyone see any holes in my plan? The more input the better

Cheers,
Matt