In order to give this a go, I modified the comment form on Melbourne photoblog and added a short Javascript code to refresh the image source. You can try it yourself on this form, just click the text “Generate another code” and wait shortly for the image to be reloaded with a new code.

I have updated the Usage sample code on SCode Plugin wiki page with this improvement.

As a side note, I found a problem where modifying img.src value via anchor tag’s onclick attribute does not work on IE 6 and the image will just disappear, while it works just fine on Firefox 2 and Opera 8.5 .

function reloadSCode() {
  var scodeImage = document.getElementById("scodeImage");
  scodeImage.src="$BLOJSOM_BLOG.getBlogBaseURL()/captcha?flavor=kink&t=" + (new Date()).getMilliseconds();
}

<a href="javascript: void(0);" onclick="reloadSCode();">Generate another code</a>.

After some mucking around, I found out that the function call must be made from the href attribute. This works on the browsers mentioned above.

<a href="javascript: reloadSCode();">Generate another code</a>.

Them browsers better implement proper Javascript standard before doomsday comes.

Changelog:

• Introduced KaptchaImageEngine using Kaptcha (was Simple Captcha) library, with 3 new flavours from KinkImageEngine, FishEyeImageEngine, and ShadowImageEngine.
• Replaced image engine class loading in image factory with constructor injection. SCodePlugin passes the image factory to SCodeServlet, instead of passing the image engines.
• Set ImageIO caching off during SCodeServlet initialisation. This improves performance and prevents any temporary disk-based image creation.

Upgrade instruction:

• In WEB-INF/lib directory, replace scodeplugin-0.4.jar with scodeplugin-0.5.jar, and add kaptcha-1.1.jar .
• On /WEB-INF/classes/blojsom-plugins.xml file, replace the scode bean declaration you have for SCodePlugin v0.4:

  <bean id="scode" class="com.mbledug.blojsom.plugin.scode.SCodePlugin" init-method="init" destroy-method="destroy">
      <constructor-arg>
          <map>
              <entry key="simple" value="com.mbledug.blojsom.plugin.scode.engine.SimpleImageEngine"/>
              <entry key="gradient" value="com.mbledug.blojsom.plugin.scode.engine.GradientImageEngine"/>
              <entry key="funky" value="com.mbledug.blojsom.plugin.scode.engine.FunkyImageEngine"/>
          </map>
      </constructor-arg>
  </bean>
  

  with this for SCodePlugin v0.5:

  <bean id="scodeSimpleImageEngine" class="com.mbledug.blojsom.plugin.scode.engine.SimpleImageEngine"/>
  <bean id="scodeGradientImageEngine" class="com.mbledug.blojsom.plugin.scode.engine.GradientImageEngine"/>
  <bean id="scodeFunkyImageEngine" class="com.mbledug.blojsom.plugin.scode.engine.FunkyImageEngine"/>
  <bean id="scodeKinkImageEngine" class="com.mbledug.blojsom.plugin.scode.engine.KinkImageEngine"/>
  <bean id="scodeFishEyeImageEngine" class="com.mbledug.blojsom.plugin.scode.engine.FishEyeImageEngine"/>
  <bean id="scodeShadowImageEngine" class="com.mbledug.blojsom.plugin.scode.engine.ShadowImageEngine"/>
  <bean id="scodeImageFactory" class="com.mbledug.blojsom.plugin.scode.ImageFactory">
      <constructor-arg>
          <map>
              <entry key="simple" value-ref="scodeSimpleImageEngine"/>
              <entry key="gradient" value-ref="scodeGradientImageEngine"/>
              <entry key="funky" value-ref="scodeFunkyImageEngine"/>
              <entry key="kink" value-ref="scodeKinkImageEngine"/>
              <entry key="fisheye" value-ref="scodeFishEyeImageEngine"/>
              <entry key="shadow" value-ref="scodeShadowImageEngine"/>
          </map>
      </constructor-arg>
  </bean>
  <bean id="scode" class="com.mbledug.blojsom.plugin.scode.SCodePlugin" init-method="init" destroy-method="destroy">
      <constructor-arg>
          <ref bean="scodeImageFactory"/>
      </constructor-arg>
  </bean>
  

Same as “kink”, these new flavors will be part of SCode Plugin 0.5 .

I quickly integrated Kaptcha into SCode Plugin by introducing KinkImageEngine, exposed to Blojsom via “kink” flavor. Here’s how it looks like:

This flavor will be included in SCode Plugin 0.5 (yet to be released).

Those issues are basically related to image generation in general and not just with SCode Plugin. However, the fact that various people are using the plugin on various different environments is a definite good thing for the plugin documentation.

In order to upgrade, simply replace scodeplugin-[prev_version].jar with scodeplugin-0.3.jar .