Admin

From here you can paste in an URL to a resource, that OmniC will attempt to display as a thumbnail. In this example an OBJ file (3D model format) of a trumpet was pasted in, and a 200x200 thumbnail was generated:

To the right of the thumbnail it has an HTML snippet (the source-code of the thumbnail to the left), and a button that will take you to the conversion graph for that type:

Documentation

On-the-fly media processing

• OmniC is a web server that listens to requests like /media/thumb.png:200x200/?url=mysite.com/myimage.jpg, and then downloads the myimage.jpg file, generates a 200x200 thumbnail of it, and responds with that thumbnail.

• It can also do filetype conversions like /media/PDF/?url=mysite.com/mydoc.doc for a PDF representation of a .doc file.

• OmniC doesn’t reinvent any wheels, instead it consists of a framework to stitch together existing CLI converters and expose them all as a microservice

Extensible conversion graph

• Central to OmniC is the “Conversion Graph”: you give the URL to a file, and the desired type, and it finds the shortest path even if it takes multiple conversions

• OmniC comes “batteries included”, and comes with converters for 3D files, documents, images, and more – but if that’s not enough, it only takes a few lines to add your own converter

Caching

• Since conversion is slow, every step is cached so it is only done once, and in production it should sit behind an upstream cache or CDN

• OmniC thus potentially can replace worker/queue systems with a much simpler solution, making dev environments far simpler while resembling production, and potentially reducing worker/queue scaling problems to load balancing problems

JavaScript framework

• OmniC comes with some JS to smooth over the experience: For uncached media, it will initially serve a placeholder to avoid timeouts, but with the included JS snippet it will reload the relevant assets when the conversion is finished

• OmniC also provides an optional JavaScript viewer system, hooked right into its conversion system: For example, a Word document might initially show as a JPG thumbnail, then on click show a PDF-based viewer in a modal

Replacing the build step

• OmniC’s concept of conversion is extremely broad and versatile: For example, it can build minified JS bundles from ES6 sources

• Ideally, OmniC could replace most of the build-step during production deployments, making launches simply deploying new code to app servers, and everything else gets done as-needed on the first request (such as by a tester on staging)