Photochop

The other day I decided to create a web service (for fun).

The objective: To provide bloggers with an easy to use, online version of Photoshop.

Spec:
The users should be able to watermark, blur, resize, or place a border around an image. The image and image processing commands should be submitted through a simple web form.

Implementation:
I started with a framework I knew fairly well: Ruby on Rails. However, I ended up realizing it was total overkill for what I wanted to accomplish.

This realization led me to a simple lightweight framework called Ramaze. Ramaze made implementation almost trivial — the entire service was under 100 lines of code.