So one day I had the need to programatically resize images using a php webserver. Subsequent research leads me to imageMagick, a port of the java library of the same name. The best part is that the library is Open Source, and therefore freely available to the public at large. A more difficult part was configuring it to play nicely with my local development server, XAMPP running on my MacOS 10.5 box.
With occasional fumbling and chasing after red herrings I eventually succeded in installing the imageMagick library, enabling all kinds of OO image resizing goodness.