Cradley Print – Adlive

Developed in 2002, this innovative online advertisement content management system utilised a third party Internet Explorer ActiveX component to allow customers of a printing company to “pre-flight” their files ready for printing on their own computers. The ActiveX component would upload an XML summary of the file to the Perl driven website which would check the details against records stored in an Microsoft Access database.

Once the file had been “passed”, the user would then be able to upload it to an FTP server which was “watched” by Adlive – once the file had been uploaded, the user would be notified and the file would be placed within their “basket”. After the user had built their “basket”, they could then select which of the 6 magazine printing companies the files should be sent to and the files would then be sent via FTP.

This project consisted of sections to handle dual HTTP and FTP file uploading, data extraction from the file, pre-flighting of files, JPEG thumbnail generation of files (via Ghostscript) and ‘shopping cart’ solution with FTP and email transmission of selected files.

There was a sister service – Photolive – which offered the same functionality but extracted and stored IPTC and EXIF information from graphical image files instead of PDF files.