Archive

Posts Tagged ‘frameworks’

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

July 29th, 2009 bodom_lx No comments

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

July 29th, 2009 bodom_lx No comments

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

How to limit a field with javascript-prototype and display the counter

December 3rd, 2008 bodom_lx No comments

For job purposes I had to learn a lot of JavaScript, including AJAX related stuffs. Like every lazy (but intelligent) developer, I looked around for frameworks that could help me doing my work. I knew that prototype existed, but I never looked at it because of lack of interest. Well it’s great, it’s really great! Nowadays everybody should use frameworks, as their abstraction permits a rapid development without worrying about things like platform compatibility, in our case browsers. Prototype also has a very nice and clean syntax that overtakes functions not compatible with every browser.

In this post I’m going to report a very nice function I implemented for limiting Form input fields, like textarea and input of type text. You have to call it via onkeyup and onkeydown events. The function accepts 3 parameters: field, limit and counterDesired.
The first is the field object, you should use the keyword this for a value.
The second parameter is a limit value, the number of characters that the field should contain at maximum.
The third parameter is optional, false as default. It permits to add a visual counter after the field, like the one you see on YouTube, for example. You can either tell to the function to add the counter for you (put inside a <span> block) or to put it inside another block you’ve already defined. In the second case, the block must have an id of the form ‘fieldID_counter’

This is the compact version, see below for some examples and the expanded, explained version:

<script type="text/javascript">
// < ![CDATA[
function limit_text(field, limit, counterDesired) {
    if (counterDesired == null)
        counterDesired = false;
    var length = $F(field).length;
    if (length > limit)
        $(field).value = $(field).value.substring(0, limit);
    if (counterDesired) {
        if ($($(field).id + '_counter')) {
            $($(field).id + '_counter').update($F(field).length + " / " + limit);
        } else {
            var counterText = new Element('span', {'id': $(field).id + '_counter'});
            counterText.update($F(field).length + " / " + limit);
            $(field).insert({'after': counterText});
        }
    }
}
// ]]>
</script>
 

Read more…

Related posts

Projects

January 24th, 2008 bodom_lx No comments

Pomodroid
A Java/Android application that interacts with a Trac
system, retrieves developer’s tasks and lets him work following the basic rules of the Pomodoro technique.

Pomotux
A task manager implementing the Pomodoro Technique

BD-review
A dynamic website to allow people to review releases (albums, demos, EPs, singles) of (young, unsigned) music bands. Written using a small subset of JavaEE technologies, without the use of web-frameworks.

BD-incollo
A dpaste/pastebin clone written using Django

BD-shell
A tiny C shell for Unix systems

BD-theme Zen
BD-blog minimalistic Wordress theme, available for free

BD-theme
Old BD-blog Wordress theme, available for free

Unipoli
A well-written Java implementation of the popular Monopoli game by Hasbro. It is a project I wrote with other 3 University mates following a software development cycle (Scrum). Unipoli was the project for our Programming Project course. Source code included, released under GPL. We also provide Javadoc, user stories, uml diagrams, binaries.

Computer Shop Warehouse IDA
A very simple, not really useful IDA (Individual Database Application) developed for the “Introduction to Database Systems” course. The documentation is really interesting


Do you think my projects are useful? Has one of my projects helped you at the University? Do you like to learn something from my experience? Are you happy to be able to download every source code?
Then, why don’t you consider a small donation? Donations are useful to maintain my domains and the infrastructures that host my Projects. I’m just a student, I’m not interested to earn profits from my projects, that will always remain free. But I would be delighted to don’t pay for them :-)

Related posts