All 6 entries tagged Files

Files project update

Follow-up to Spring and Hypersonic/Hibernate tests from Kieran's blog

It’s been a while since my last update on this project. Unfortuately we’ve not done as much as I would have liked. Both Sarah and I have had holiday and we’ve been busy on other projects.

We’re back in the swing of things now and we’re moving forward a lot quicker now that most of the underlying infrastructure is in place.

To give an idea of the size of the project already (as well as just numbers can tell you anything):

• 75 classes and interfaces
• 22 test classes with 50 tests
• 15 hibernate mapping files
• 5 database tables (we are mapping quite a few classes to a single table in quite a few places)
• 14 jsps (not many as we’ve not got loads of interfaces to some of the underlying code yet)

So, what does this code do then?

We’ve recently added quotas and the ability to email a file to someone. This basically sends an email with a link in it to a unique download URL that lasts a week and lets the person who sent the file keep track of downloads of that file (they get notified by email when it downloads and can see the download count on an web interface within their account).

We’ve also got the permissions system in now so that you can give view/edit/admin permissions to a person or a group of people (as usual there is no interface for this yet…just the code).

Everything is still pretty ugly as we’ve not done any graphic design work, so I’m not going to post any screenshots!

: 24 Nov 2006 12:23 |  Tags: Files ITS Java Programming Work |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

DropSend for sale

Writing about web page http://www.barenakedapp.com/dropsend/dropsend-monthly-profit

Carson systems are selling DropSend so that they can concentrate on their new Amigo project. What makes this interesting is that they are doing their usual openness during the sale and are posting what would usually be regarded as trade secrets on their blog:

How much profit does DropSend bring in each month?

• Revenue: $9,041.81 per month (and growing by 8.6% per month)
• Costs: $2,100 per month (Servers at 365main.com + maintenance)
• Profit: $6,941.81 per month

Looks like a lot of people have this sending/storing large files problem.

: 08 Nov 2006 09:08 |  Tags: Dropsend Files |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Spring and Hypersonic/Hibernate tests

Follow-up to Files project dev server from Kieran's blog

Having been away on holiday for 2 weeks and having quite a bit of catching up to do with other stuff, we’ve not made huge leaps in the last few weeks. However, we’re building up steam again now and have finally sorted out after a few restarts the domain model we’re going to be going for around the key aspects of accounts, files, folders, etc…

Up until now for speed of prototyping, we’ve been working with Spring, but not yet involved a database as we can quite easily just talk directly to the file system for now. However, now is the time to start getting more complex and we need somewhere to store all the metadata of all kinds about the files and accounts.

As usual, we’ll try and incrementally do the Hibernate mappings and start to build the database scheme. To do this quickly we’ll be building against some tests and a hypersonic database to start with. Spring provides the handy “AbstractTransactionalDataSourceSpringContextTests” class which allow easy binding of Spring objects and also a simple way to plug in transactional capabilities to your tests.

By coupling these test with the Hypersonic database which can be built and torn down in memory in just milliseconds, we can prototype the database very quickly.

Hibernate session-factory config

<session-factory>
        <property name="dialect">org.hibernate.dialect.HSQLDialect</property>
         <property name="use_outer_join">true</property>
        <property name="hbm2ddl.auto">create-drop</property>

        <mapping resource="......hbm.xml"/>
   </session-factory>

Spring sessionfactory and datasource

<bean id="sessionFactory" class="org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.LocalSessionFactoryBean">
        <property name="configLocation"><value>hypersonic-hibernate.cfg.xml</value></property>
        <property name="dataSource" ref="dataSource"/>
    </bean>

    <bean id="dataSource" class="org.springframework.jdbc.datasource.DriverManagerDataSource">
        <property name="driverClassName">
          <value>org.hsqldb.jdbcDriver</value>
        </property>
        <property name="url">
          <value>jdbc:hsqldb:.</value>
         </property>
        <property name="username">
          <value>sa</value>
        </property>
        <property name="password">
          <value></value>
        </property>
    </bean>

So based on your mappings files, the database schema gets created in a new hypersonic database for each test giving you a working and clear schema to test against. Magic.

public class HypersonicTests extends AbstractTransactionalDataSourceSpringContextTests {

    protected String[] getConfigLocations() {
        return new String[] { "file:apps/webinterface/src/applicationContext.xml","file:apps/webinterface/test-src/hypersonic-db-context.xml"};
    }

}

public class DbConnectionTests extends HypersonicTests {

    private SessionFactory _sessionFactory;

    public final void testDbConnection() throws Exception {

        Session session = getSessionFactory().openSession();

        session.save(new AccountImpl(null, null, "Test", null));

        session.flush();

        List accounts = session.createCriteria(Account.class).list();

        assertEquals(1, accounts.size());

    }

    public SessionFactory getSessionFactory() {
        return _sessionFactory;
    }

    public void setSessionFactory(final SessionFactory sessionFactory) {
        _sessionFactory = sessionFactory;
    }

}

: 01 Nov 2006 10:25 |  Tags: Files ITS Java Programming Work |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Files project dev server

Follow-up to Getting a project up and running from Kieran's blog

One of the important things to try and get ready as early as possible is a test/pre-production system that is fairly close to what you expect your live environment to be. This is so that you don’t spend the whole time developing on a single JBoss instance on a single processor Windows box with local storage and then deploy on a multi-processor, multi-JBoss and remote storage box and discover that nothing works!

We are now starting to run Solaris 10 which gives us the great Zones feature. Our sys admins have setup a zone on one of our new boxes that is a test/pre-prod environment for the files project. We’ll run something like this:

• Single Apache 1.3x instance with HAProxy to load balance between the JBoss instances
• Two JBoss instances both running live rather than a live and a standby
• For now local storage, but eventually we’ll use our NetApp

The twin live JBoss instances means that our application will have to be completely stateless. This is a good thing for scalability, but it makes multi-step processes within the application a bit harder as we won’t have a session to store data in. This is usually not a problem for simple applications, but working on something like a mutli-step zip upload could be tricky.

The other advantage of having a test instance up and running is that you can start to point very early test users at it (rather than a local instance on your own machine). This gets you some good early feedback/ideas/bug-spotting.

: 05 Oct 2006 14:51 |  Tags: Files ITS Java Programming Work |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Getting a project up and running

Follow-up to New online files project from Kieran's blog

Starting a new project is quite intimidating as you start with absolutely nothing. Before you really get going you’ve got to get the following stuff together:

1. A JIRA project (this is our great bug tracking software from Atlassian)
2. A CVS project (gotta backup that code)
3. A basic project structure in Eclipse (need to ensure you can easily build multiple distributions from a single code base)
4. An Ant build.xml file to build the project…even though there’s not really got much to build yet…there will soon
5. All the basic Jar files you’re going to need, such as Spring and the like

Once you’ve got the basic project infrastructure in place, you might actually be able to write some code. Some people might say that you’ll have to write a spec first, but that’s not how we do things. We are very keen to get things out the door because we and our users don’t really know what they want until they start using stuff. This works well for us as we’re pretty good at being responsive to our users’ needs and can keep the project nice and easy to refactor and change as we go along.

Being a good boy, I’m making sure that I’ve got lots of tests right from the start. This kind of project is basically all about files so the key thing that it would be nice to get right first time is how to model the file system. It is worth spending a bit of time on the really key parts of the system as you could refactor this later on, but you really wouldn’t want to.

Whilst this very early coding and infrastructure work is going on, it is quite hard to have more than one person working on the project. Once there is a bit more meat to the project someone else can start to get a bit more involved and start something like the file download part of the project. In the mean time it’s worth doing some things that can be done in parallel. A couple of things we have going on in the background are:

1. The visual/graphic design work is starting to be looked at by Hannah
2. Looking into how we might implement certain file system protocols is being done by Sarah

Although it’s only a couple of days in, I already have some reasonably good code for basic file management and file upload, but not much in the way of a web interface for it yet, except a basic file upload and file listings page.

: 25 Sep 2006 11:45 |  Tags: Files ITS Java Programming Work |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

New online files project

After working on Single Sign On and BlogBuilder and various other smaller projects on and off over the last couple of years, I have a big new project to get my teeth into.

Basically we (me and Sarah) are reworking how members of the University can get at their files over the web and send and receive large files given the restrictions and problems with emailing large files.

The full scope of the project is not yet known so I couldn’t just list all of the features that the system will have. However, our basic goals are:

• Upload files to a web based file store (and of course then download them so that you can get at them at home easily)
• Set permisisons on those files (based around our SSO and WebGroups system)
• Be able to send other users files that you’ve uploaded so that they get a link to the file to download over the web
• Allow non-Warwick users to send you large files that you won’t be able to get over email

There is a lot more possible detail in these features that we’ve had a think about already, but a lot of the finer decisions are yet to be taken.

We like to do things in a fairly agile way so that we get out working software quite quickly and then rapidly improve it based on testing and user feedback. This means hopefully there’ll be something to see relatively quickly (but don’t expect miracles) and it’ll improve with new versions all the time.

I’ll be writing about our progress here and giving some insights into how projects like this get built here at E-Lab.

: 20 Sep 2006 14:22 |  Tags: Files ITS Java Programming Work |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem