Scravatar - A tiny scala library for Gravatar

I tend to get upset whenever I sign up to a site and they do not retrieve my profile picture from Gravatar (yeah, I'm looking at you meetup.com) . Because no one should have to upload a picture of themself on the Internet in a Sombrero more than once. Gravatar is a very simple, yet very good service that links profile pictures with e-mail addresses, every site out there with a profile concept should use it.

Just to see how easy it is to integrate with Gravatar I decided to write a tiny Scala framework for generating the Gravatar URLs, aptly named Scravatar.

It is hosted on Github and as of today, it is even available in maven central.

Here's how it works in its simplest form:

Avatar("you@example.com").avatarUrl

If you want to a URL that you can use as src in the img tag on your site served over a HTTPS connect, you'd want to set the ssl flag to true. That way browsers won't won't show a warning saying that your site contains insecure content.

Avatar("you@example.com").ssl(true).avatarUrl

And here's an example setting all the available properties before generating a URL.

Gravatar(email).ssl(true).default(Monster).maxRatedAs(R).forceDefault(true).size(100).avatarUrl

The Gravatar class in Scravatar is immutable (and thus thread safe).

As for the maven central repo, the groupid is com.andersen-gott and the artifactid is scravatar. It is cross compiled for Scala version 2.9.1 and 2.9.2.