Posts Tagged ‘ web

Announcing BD-review, a free platform for music reviews written using JavaEE

BD-review is a dynamic website to allow people to review releases (albums, demos, EPs, singles) of (young, unsigned) music bands. The project is the outcome of the Internet Technologies course at the Faculty of Computer Science of the Free University of Bolzano. The requirements of the project were to build a website using a small subset of JavaEE technologies, without the use of web-frameworks.

A screenshot of a Review

A screenshot of a Review

The project is not really meant for production use. It was made as a strong, working and correct base for studying JavaEE academically. It should be useful for every student (also non-student) willing to have an overview on JSP and study it. The code is well-written, uses MVC, and the whole project is documented in detail in a 20+ pages report.

Read more on the project page, download the sources and play with it! Please let me know about your experience with BD-review code.

Related posts

BD-review

BD-review is a dynamic website to allow people to review releases (albums, demos, EPs, singles) of (young, unsigned) music bands. The project is the outcome of the Internet Technologies course at the Faculty of Computer Science of the Free University of Bolzano.  The requirements of the project were to build a website using a small subset of JavaEE technologies, without the use of web-frameworks.

Therefore, this project is not really meant for production use. It was made as a strong, working and correct base for studying JavaEE academically. It should be useful for every student (also non-student) willing to have an overview on JSP and study it. The code is well-written, uses MVC, and the whole project is documented in detail in a 20+ pages report.

A screenshot of a Review

A screenshot of a Review

I encourage to read the PDF report of the project. It contains detailed information about the analysis and design phases, as well as the architecture description, screenshots, problems found etc. Please read also the README file. It contains configuration instructions.

There is a running demo located on the evaluation server of the course, but I think it will be removed soon.

Quick Jump:

Vision

Requirements Implemented

Technologies Overview

Download

License

Vision

The aim of the project is to build a dynamic website to allow people to review releases (albums, demos, EPs, singles) of (young, unsigned) music bands. Users will be able to signal interesting materials and review them, while other users will be able to comment the reviews, too.
This web 2.0-oriented application should allow unknown talented musicians to achieve a higher notoriety but also to improve their productions.

Screenshot of the personal user page

Screenshot of the personal user page

Requirements Implemented

I report here the requirements of the course, all implemented by BD-review:
What BD-review implements is:

  • User Management
    • List existing users of the system
    • Creation of a new user
    • Deletion of the existing user
  • List and modify access rights of the users
    • check boxes with some capabilities (min 3)
  • User registration and login to the system
  • Items management
    • Users add, edit or remove items
    • Users comments or reviews items
    • Administrator can manage the comments (edit,remove, add)
  • Personalization
    • Salutation for a returning user
    • List resources that are new from the last visit
    • Customization of the layout for a class of users.
  • Techniques – MUST be used
    • Static HTML
    • CSS: all the look and feel must be in CSS files
    • Javascript: check input and manage menus
    • Servlet: Reading (parameters and headers) and writing headers and resulting page
    • Servlet: Session management with cookies and session object
    • Servlet: Redirect the client
    • Servlet: Forward to another page or servlet
    • JSP: Expressions, scriptlets and declarations Beans
    • DBMS access trough JDBC
    • Integration of JSP and Servlets (forward and include) using MVC pattern.

In addition, BD-review implements two Filters and plays with Regular Expressions.

Technologies Overview

  • J2EE technologies (JSP, Servlets and JavaBeans)
  • Database support (PostgreSQL 8.3) through JDBC 4
  • XHTML Strict 1.0 + Cascading Style Sheets 2.1 for presentation
  • Apache Commons for conversion and Bean population routines
  • Some utility methods found on Books and Internet (their provenience is cited in the sourcecode)
  • Javascript for confirmation system and form validation
  • Regular Expressions
  • TinyMCE rich WYSIWYG HTML editor
Screenshot: modifying a Review

Screenshot: modifying a Review

Download

PDF report of the project
Complete Source Code and Documentation (as Netbeans Project)

The Future

There will not be future developments for the project. It was not a real-life project but I will be very proud if you find it an useful example for learning JSP. You can also use it as a basis for developing a real project (also a University Project). You can do anything you want with BD-review, but please respect the license. I would be happy if you send me an email about your experience in using BD-review.

License

BD-review is released under The Gnu Affero GPL version 3! This is different from the license of the contents of the blog

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License
along with this program. If not, see < http ://www.gnu.org/licenses/ >.

Related posts

BD-incollo 0.9 is out!

It took me about one year to find some time to enhance my project BD-incollo. I worked hard for 5 days and to add new features and fight the (huge) amount of spam that was wasting my database space. Now I’m very proud to announce bd-incollo 0.9, a free, light, speedy, anonymous Pastebin clone written in Python Django. This version introduces a lot of new features, including the possibility to make diffs between pastes, and fights spam using Akismet. Read more about the features on the project page and on the new News section on the website that makes use of BD-incollo, incollo.com .

BD-incollo 0.9 is free software as always, under the Gnu Affero General Public License 3.

Currently, you can:

  • Copy, Paste and store a text / source code snippet to the system
  • NEW! Give other people the possibility to discover your Paste (make a Paste either public or private)
  • Decide to colorize the syntax of the Paste
  • Share it using its URL
  • NEW! Enhance Pastes! Create a Paste starting from an old one
  • NEW! View differences! Makes use of the powerful diff-match-patch by Neil Fraser to see differences between two Pastes
  • NEW! Antispam protection using Akismet and akismet.py by Michael Foord
  • Download it as plain text
  • View it as plain text
  • Search something interesting through other pastes!
  • Report abuses to site admins

It also uses a very smart hash system that automatically re-computes a hash key in case of collision.

Here is an example of Paste: http://incollo.com/f341e6a4b
Here is an example of enhancement of the Paste: http://incollo.com/ba22929ac
Here is a full-screen diff of the Pastes: http://incollo.com/compare/f341e6a4b/ba22929ac

Play with them! Use incollo.com, spread it!

Road to 1.0

1.0 development will start after my next examination session (on September) and will surely include:

  • Some asynchronous improvements
  • The possibility to teach Akismet about Spam and Ham in Pastes (when admin user is logged in)
  • More cleaner code
  • The possibility to associate a user to its Pastes via a Cookie (always anonymous) and let him delete them
  • Comments to snippets?
  • What else? Contact me if you’ve got ideas!

Related posts

Finally, the site has entered top 20000 Netcraft Most Visited Web Sites

It is always a great satisfaction to reach a goal. It took me about 3 years but I finally did it!
Today bd-things.net entered top 20k in Netcraft Most Visited Websites, at position 19058!
On September I desired to re-enter top 30k in about a year after the domain name change .
8 months after I reached a even better result.

I took two screenshots of the event , because I don’t think that this will happen so much often in my life :)

bd-thingsnet_top_20k_netcraft_2

bd-things_top_20k_netcraft_1

I would like to thank all the visitors of bd-things.net for their support, even if I would be happier to see more comments that would surely help to improve my articles.

In something more than a month I will publish 3 project source codes: a C++ task manager, a simple dynamic website using Java EE5 and a C (subset) compiler. All of them started as University Projects. The first program will surely be expanded and improved after the publish of the source code. But before that time, I have to study hard for ca. 20 deadlines I must accomplish. See you again.

Related posts

What is taking me busy – Pomotux!

I’m currently pressed by my University life, that’s because I don’t post often.
There are 3 big projects for this semester: a C compiler, a dynamic website using Java Servlets and JSP and the most interesting one: a C++ program for Software Engineering Project course.
I’m working with other two collegues on a task manager for people using the Pomodoro Technique by Francesco Cirillo.
The project is called Pomotux and is under development following strong software engineering methodologies (Scrum@Xp). Pomotux is under construction since 2 months and uses technologies such as SQLite to store and play with tasks. The interesting fact regarding our data structure choice is that we are also using a framework for obtaining ORM, called LiteSQL.

LiteSQL is a C++ library that integrates C++ objects tightly to relational database and thus provides an object persistence layer

LiteSQL is still young and immature but powerful enough for our scope. We are also happy to provide feedback to their developers, that are ready to help us. They even wrote a patch for us!
Pomotux is reaching an unexpected stability. Unexpected because it is written by 3 young people that come from a light Java experience and saw C++ 3 months ago. It works under Linux and its graphical interface uses QT 4.5.0. It should work on any *NIX variant that meets dependencies, but also under Windows with some light modifications.
It will support just the basic features of the technique (unfortunately we don’t have the time to fully work on it) but it’s ready for expansions such as team support and statistics.
We will be happy to release the sources as soon as we finish the course, hoping that people will find it useful and that some serious programmers take it and make it the perfect tool for Pomodorians :) I will also contact the author of the Pomodoro Technique when we release it.

Related posts

BD-things reaches Netcraft top 30000 in 4 months!

Netcraft began to evalutate the new domain of my site on September, 23rd 2008. After one month, the blog made a jump of about 700k positions in their rankings. I thought that I could reach top 30000 in 6 months starting from the domain change .
I’ve just realized that I reached the target in these days. BD-things is currently at position 28850 in the “Most Visited Web Sites” according to Netcraft. I’m above www.vodafone.nl :) .
This also means that BD-things.net made a jump of 797573 positions in less than 5 months!
I’m very proud of this result, and hope that this exam session finishes soon to let me come back to post again

Related posts