Also, I want to use Gimp to render GIF Graphics on the fly. Gimp would run on the server, and data stored on the server would hopefully be used to render histograms, pie charts, etc and dished out to people visiting the site.

Gimp _can_ be used for this purpose, but probably a different solution (such as the GD library and it's associated graphing library) would be best. I use GIMP a lot from the command-line, but the problem with how I do it is that I run a new GIMP process for every graphic, which takes several seconds to load, thus would really load down your server if you were doing it in real time. The way you would need to do it is to run the script-fu-server, although I'm not sure this can be done without GUI mode, although it might. I have not played with the script-fu-server myself.

Anyway, the way my command-line works is this:

1) I have a script-fu script in scheme

2) I create the following shell script:

#!/bin/sh

gimp -i -d -s -b "(nmm-create-and-save-blue-button \"$1\" \"$2\")" "(gimp-quit 0)" 2>/dev/null

nmm-create-and-save-blue-button is my script-fu script, which takes two parameters - the text for the button and the filename. The GIMP flags may need to be modified for your purpose. The one thing is that your scripts CANNOT mess with displays. For example, if you try to do gimp-display-new, you'll get an error, since you don't have a GUI.

Now, if you decide that not having a GUI is too much of a pain, you can always run Xvfb, which is an X server that runs in memory only (i.e. - it doesn't display on a screen - it's a "virtual frame buffer").

Anyway, I hope that helps. My guess is, although I haven't tried it, si that you would want to run GIMP with

gimp -i -c -s -b '(1 10008 "/var/log/gimp.log")' &

And then connect to port 10008 and give it your commands (although I think they have to be in scheme, but if you're using the procedural database, the functions you access can be in any language).

Let me know if you have questions.

Jon

John