Question

I want to create an animation using an image that refreshes every 15 minutes hosted at this url:
http://www.bungie.net/Stats/Halo3/Nightmap.ashx

What is the best way to store the images and then animate(loop) the 24 most recent images?

Should I use a mysql database to store it or something else?

What are your thoughts?

Thanks

Answer 1

Perhaps you want something like this:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/satpics/latest_IR.html?

As you can see in the html of that page, they get the images names output as a JS array. You would use PHP in this case to get those names and make that JS array.

EDIT: To retrieve the images from that URL you can use php’s file() function or the curl functions, for which there is an example here. As I see it, the url returns only the image file itself, so you don’t have to bother with html scrapping.

Then, when you click the Play button the images are first preloaded via AJAX, this way the “animation” is quite smooth. If you use Jquery for the client side functionality it should be pretty easy both to preload the images via AJAX and do the animation itself.