Metasys Technologies Ltd
Guiding principles
Guiding principles

Simplicity
JPEGStore is designed to be as simple as possible whilst still giving a sensible degree of functionality. Simplicity keeps it flexible and inexpensive. There are far more powerful and specialised systems available but they are often very expensive to implement and and extra development time is costly. The simple approach goes right to the core with JPEGStore and there is as little database involvement as possible. This also makes it run very fast and improves stability. Less bells and whistles means less things to go wrong.

Robustness
It needs to be basically be able to run itself with only an absolute minimum of maintenance. It shouldn't need supporting and should be more or less self explanatory. All actions should be intuitive, including administration functions.

Easy to deploy and maintain in large quantities
From an administration point of view the system needs to be easy to maintain and easy to set up. The way it has been designed means that you get much of the flexibilitly and portability associated with an individual website but code updates are intrinsically system-wide i.e. upgrading one site upgrades *all* sites. This "black box" approach also means that customisations to the site don't affect code upgrades or functionality.

Shouldn't reinvent the wheel
There are many bigger, better images storage systems out there but there are often very specific reasons for choosing one or another. The aim is not to overlap with the bigger systems but instead to fill the void at the lower end of the market which is not suitably catered for by these larger systems. For the small business or individual photographer there don't seem to be any image storage systems which don't cost a fortune to set up but also won't curl up and die when faced with 150+ thumbnails on a page, especially not ones which have ecommerce of *any* kind build into the design paradigm (in *any* price range!).

Usefully customisable
I wanted to be able to offer a reasonable amount of customisation without it impacting on the the maintainablility or code structure. This is part of the reason the site is only fully compliant with IE5+ and Netscape 6+, because older browsers had less support for CSS and thus would have made customisations harder to implement well.