Rails app supplying image to a static page?

rubyonrails-talk
1

Can anyone help point me in the right direction on doing the following?

Say I have a Rails app that deals with photos at photo.website.com, and I also have a legacy site at www.website.com.

What I would like to do is from a static html page on www.website.com have a random photo displayed from the photo app.

So, if I put something like this in my static page: <img src="http:// photo.website.com/randompic.jpg" /> would it be possible when a user hits the static page to have it routed to an action that would pull a random photo and return it to the static page in the form of an image?

Thanks in advance. Mark

2

well, i don't know much about your rails app. so i can't tell you how exactly you should do it. but generally spoken: yes, that should be possible. actually in exactly the way you proposed.

3

Hi Mark,

I would be inclined to create a controller and have an action on it that
serves up a random image.

This would make your static URL something like

http://photo.website.com/random/pic

Create a controller called random, and an action called pic (you can call
these anything, or even use the default index action). In your action,
just pick a random image and serve it back to the browser.

We do something similar, without the randomness to serve images to
external applications.

Cheers Simon