Stephen Toney has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I need to do some image format-conversion and thumbnailing in a CGI to be shared-hosted at Verio under Windows. But Verio doesn't allow installation of DLLs on a shared host. Is there such as thing as a Perl imaging module that doesn't rely on an independent library? Or one whose library was EXEs instead of DLLs?

So far I've looked into GD, ImageMacick, and about a dozen others, but they all require DLLs to be installed. Gee, I'd hate to have to write all that stuff in Perl!

Many thanks in advance for any ideas!

Stephen

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: non-DLL graphics library
by ikegami (Patriarch) on Mar 02, 2005 at 21:56 UTC
    ImageMagick also comes as executables.
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      Thanks for the reply. I've been looking for an executable for days, and tried again today after your message, with no success. There is a Convert.exe and similar EXEs, but they requires numerous DLLs and registry keys.

      If you can point me to a self-contained EXE for Windows, I'd be most grateful!
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        oh I see. It's weird that you can't use any DLLs. How do they prevent you?
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Re: non-DLL graphics library
by fauria (Deacon) on Mar 02, 2005 at 22:30 UTC
    Image manipulation requires graphic libraries such as ImageMagick or GD.

    Perl modules provides bindings (interfaces) to this libraries.

    I dont know so much about Windows systems, but under almost every sort of Unix system you can export a variable to point to a shared objects directory outside the main directories (LD_LIBRARY_PATH vs. ld.so.conf in Linux, for example). Maybe you can do something similar under Win, and then install Perl modules in another directory you own.

    If this is not possible either due to Windows design (again, i dont know so much about this), or due to company policies, you can allways use statically compiled versions of programs that manipulate images and use them from your Perl scripts.
[reply]
      Thanks for the reply. A statically compiled version is exactly what I'm looking for but can't find. Unfortunately I can't compile the source myself. Any futher suggestions would be most welcome!
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