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Playing Gravatar Image

In this blog I have created a basic example to generate gravatar using email address with Play Framework

Gravatar: An “avatar” is an image that represents you online—a little picture that appears next to your name when you interact with websites.

A Gravatar is a Globally Recognized Avatar. You upload it and create your profile just once, and then when you participate in any Gravatar-enabled site, your Gravatar image will automatically follow you there.

Gravatar images may be requested just like a normal image, using an IMG tag. To get an image specific to a user, you must first calculate their email hash.

The most basic image request URL looks like this:

http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/HASH

where HASH is replaced with the calculated hash for the specific email address you are requesting. For example:

http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/205e460b479e2e5b48aec07710c08d50

Size : By default, images are presented at 80px by 80px if no size parameter is supplied. You may request a specific image size, which will be dynamically delivered from Gravatar by using the s= or size= parameter and passing a single pixel dimension (since the images are square):

http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/205e460b479e2e5b48aec07710c08d50?s=200

Default Image : What happens when an email address has no matching Gravatar image? By default, this:

http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/00000000000000000000000000000000

If you’d prefer to use your own default image (perhaps your logo, a funny face, whatever), then you can easily do so by supplying the URL to an image in the d= or default= parameter. The URL should be URL-encoded to ensure that it carries across correctly, for example:

http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/00000000000000000000000000000000?d=http%3A%2F%2Fexample.com%2Fimages%2Favatar

In addition to allowing you to use your own image, Gravatar has a number of built in options which you can also use as defaults. Most of these work by taking the requested email hash and using it to generate a themed image that is unique to that email address. To use these options, just pass one of the following keywords as the d= parameter to an image request:

404: do not load any image if none is associated with the email hash, instead return an HTTP 404 (File Not Found) response
mm: (mystery-man) a simple, cartoon-style silhouetted outline of a person (does not vary by email hash)
identicon: a geometric pattern based on an email hash
monsterid: a generated ‘monster’ with different colors, faces, etc
wavatar: generated faces with differing features and backgrounds
retro: awesome generated, 8-bit arcade-style pixelated faces
blank: a transparent PNG image (border added to HTML below for demonstration purposes)

Used Java Image Requests technique to generate hex format md5 of an input string
Used Gravatar Image Requests technique to access gravatar image
Embedded JS & CSS libraries with WebJars
Integrating with a CSS framework (Twitter Bootstrap 3.1.1)
Bootswatch-Darkly with Twitter Bootstrap 3.1.1 to improve the look and feel of the application

Instructions

To run the Play Framework, you need JDK 6 or later
Install Typesafe Activator if you do not have it already. You can get it from here
Execute ./activator clean compile to build the product
Execute ./activator run to execute the product
playing-gravatar should now be accessible at localhost:9000