The question is quite easy: what is the best way to store uploaded files in a clustered Spring MVC environnment?
Example: let's say I'm coding a social network and I have to possibility to upload my personal profile picture. The user will then have at most one image associated with his profile.
A solution can then be to add a blob column to the users table in the DB — I read this is good when in a clustered environment (easier to scale the DB than a folder containing lots of images). Is it true? How can I achieve this in a JPA (Hibernate and PostgreSQL) environment? I saw there is the @Lob annotation but what type of variable should I use? byte[]?
Another solution is to store them on the hard drive. What is the best path to store these images? In the webapp folder? In the classpath? In another folder outside the Spring context?
Thank you very much for your help.
Update: an important detail that I forgot to say. The administration dashboard (CMS/back end) of this website will be coded in PHP (I know, I know...) while the front-end will be coded in Java Spring (MVC). The database is all managed by the java part (JPA). Whatever the final choice will be, it has to be compatible with this requirement.
