Picture Rotators

It seems picture rotators are all the rage on Web sites these days. As a Director I get requests to approve and purchase software to create all sorts of snazzy effects for the ubiquitous picture rotator. A colleague took pity on me one day and sent me the following information. I posted to my blog because it was about to get lost in my e-mail.
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I found they were broken down into 3 major categories in the freebie market.

1. Scripts – Java, PHP, ASP. Java Script being the most popular.
2. Flash
3. A few were built in languages such as C but these were few and far in between.

The scripts typically require the pictures to be listed inline. There are those that use external config files that reference flat files that are comma delimited or use a XML like format to list the pictures and optional functionality.

The flash versions used an external files as noted above from what I gathered
Allowing for text to be displayed with the text, clickable images that take the user to other URL’s and custom affects were available to differing degrees.

[Your Multimedia Specialist] likes the JW Player for Flash. JW also has a flash picture rotator. http://www.longtailvideo.com/players/jw-image-rotator

The JW rotator supports XSPF. XSPF is not as straight forward as a comma delimited flat file – it has an XML look and feel. The nice thing for techies is that there are plenty of XSPF generators that will walk a directory and find all files and build the XSPF config file. The XSPF generators are typically built in PHP. A few are built in ASP.

I found tech discussions on how to query the directory system using various scripting languages to get a list of files to build lists but I did not find an implementation of a rotator that built the list during presentation. I assume the issue is concern of how long the build would take if a lot of pictures were in the directory AND that you would not be able to give each picture a URL to navigate to so this would limit functionality.