About Magnolia Box

Magnolia Box is the UK’s leading art software company.

We develop, transform and manage our clients’ website operations and help power online art sales.

The platform offers a sophisticated yet affordable solution for Artists, Photographers, Galleries, Museums, Publishers, Image and Picture Library’s, Sport Clubs, Printers, Picture Framers and Retailers to sell art and image based products online via their own dedicated e-commerce shop.

Magnolia Soft provides a flexible, reliable and scalable e-commerce platform in one out-of-the-box implementation. Unlike many off-the-shelf packages, our software has been designed from inception for the online retail of art and imagery. The specific characteristics of the art industry have been incorporated into every aspect of our solution design, ensuring each implementation is tailored to your requirements.

There are few upfront costs for our standard implementation: clients simply pay an affordable annual fee to access all the features and functions of our software.

There are no hidden charges: our service is delivered inclusive of design, implementation, equipment, hosting, bandwidth and transaction activity.

For more information about Magnolia Soft solutions, please email us at: enquiries@magnoliasoft.net or call +44 (0)870 300 1171.

Magnolia Box helps St Trinian's Girls Steal Priceless Vermeer In Movie

During the past year we've been surprised by the number of requests we've had to provide fine art prints for TV and film productions. Recently, Mayhem Films - producers of the new St Trinian's film starring Rupert Everett, Colin Firth and Mischa Barton - needed a priceless work of art for a grand heist in the movie and we were happy to help out with their prop requirements. A large part of the plot apparently revolves around those dirty St. Trinian's strumpets attempting to steal Vermeer's famous 'Girl with a Pearl Earring'. If you actually read the plot summary on Wikipedia then our little picture appears to have one of the more substantial roles. Unfortunately, not a single member of the team, nor any of our extended friends and family, have seen this movie so we have absolutely no idea about how well our print comes across. Nevertheless, if anyone wants to buy a version 'As Not Seen on Screen' then you can get Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring Print here.

Changing the colour model of a BufferedImage in Coldfusion 8

We carry out a lot of image processing to achieve our photos to art solution and our frame and canvas preview feature. Most of this code was written before Coldfusion 8, which introduced lots of new image processing features native to the language. As a result, we have written Java code, some in-line with our Coldfusion, some in external Java classes. When trialling our upgrade to Coldfusion 8, we were pleased to find that our existing Java image code worked just as it did previously on Coldfusion 7. However, a week ago, we discovered that that some users were receiving timeout errors when uploading JPEGs to our photos to art solution. It turned out that the error only occurred with certain types of JPEGs, those which Java's BufferedImage class considers to have a custom colour model. We have code which converts these to workable RGB images, but it was this code which was failing on Coldfusion 8. I put the code in its simplest form, into Java...

BufferedImage bi_out = new BufferedImage(bi_in.getWidth(),
     bi_in.getHeight(), BufferedImage.TYPE_3BYTE_BGR);
Graphics2D g = bi_out.createGraphics();
g.drawImage(bi_in, 0, 0, null);
g.dispose();

...and ran some tests outside of Coldfusion, through both the JRE 1.6.0, and the one in my standard Coldfusion 8 install. Both JREs worked without problems, which meant the problem must lie with Coldfusion, which led me to this solution. So if you are having problems using Java to convert a BufferedImage of TYPE_CUSTOM in Coldfusion 8, you could try one of the two fixes below, as outlined here:

1. Remove clibwrapper_jiio.jar from "lib" folder.
2. Or, set this system property to the JVM. -Dcom.sun.media.imageio.disableCodecLib=true . You can set this in [cf-install_dir]/runtime/bin/jvm.config if you are using standalone coldfusion server.

So far I have been unable to find any negative side-effects of this fix.

We like Coldfusion 8

Our server is a much busier machine than it was 12 months ago. The increased traffic put a noticeable strain on Coldfusion 7, and as a result we had a few stability issues. Over time, Coldfusion gradually ate away at the server's memory until eventually it crashed, requiring a quick restart. We tried many different tweaks and managed to improve things slightly, but we were always fighting the problem. Three weeks ago we carried out the much-anticipated upgrade to Coldfusion 8. The first thing we observed was how the pages load consistently faster than they used to, we don't have any metrics but the difference is noticeable. Magnolia Soft uses the Mach-II framework and an object-oriented architecture which means that Coldfusion 8's increased performance for object creation has made a significant impact on response times. However, the most impressive improvement to note is its improved stability; since upgrading, we haven't restarted the server once. The server has been running like a dream, like a real server!