Although rails is a great development environment for web applications, for a newbie the deployment of a rails application can be challenging due to the myriad dependencies on various gems, native libraries etc.
image_science is one such ruby library that provides an easy way to generate thumbnails. It is therefore quite popular in web2.0 type applications (there isn't a site today that doesn't let you upload photographs of yourself, your pets, gadgets, whatever). It is a very simple implementation and available as a ruby gem and so easy to install. However, the real work is done by a native library called FreeImage and installing this on OpenSolaris is a little bit of work. Although, I use OpenSolaris here, the instructions apply to Solaris 10 as well if you are using ruby from Web …
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