Vidoll :: Storyboard

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Requirements

Code Status

Deployment Status

Screenshots

Documentation

Installation Notes

Database Config

Storyboard is a J2EE web-application for the reading and submittance of stories, articles and similar textual content that can be commented upon. Storyboard uses similar websites, message boards as references for its functionality. The general operations are:

  • Author registration / login.
  • Author's adding Stories and Chapters.
  • Author's maintaining their work.
  • Users navigating through category trees.
  • Users reading the Chapters of Stories.
  • Users commenting on Chapters.
  • Registered Users marking Authors or Stories as Favourites.

Only Authors (Registered Users) can create Stories and so forth. Security is generic login, with pages in the /users directory suffering Authentication checks on the session.

Prospective operations could be:

  • Placing Authorisation/Authentication on Author categories/stories: This would allow for Storyboard to be used for the placement of private or confidential articles that require permission to be viewed and commented on.
  • Messaging system: 'Real time' exchange of messages between Registered Users or notification of comments etc. placed on a Chapter.
  • Allow binary files to be attached to Chapters (e.g. images).

The Platform

Storyboard is a J2EE application. It uses:

  • EJB2.0 (CMP2.0, Stateless Session Beans)
  • SQLJ (For Primary Key generation from database Sequences)
  • JSP (including custom Tag libraries 1.2?)
  • Jakarta Commons framework
  • Javascript & CSS
  • CLOB datatype for content

So far, based on what I have to develop Storyboard with, the application runs on:

  • Oracle 9iAS v903 OC4J
  • Oracle 9i RDBMS

The SQLJ used for EJB Primary Key generation is uses Oracle specific classes. After a first release that has all the major functionality, I plan on deploying to different Application Servers (JBoss first) and setting up other databases (PostgresSQL, MySQL if it can handle it). The aim is to have Storyboard functioning on Open Source infrastructure.

Code Status

Storyboad had only a limited set of UML notation. In an earlier self-project (much larger), all my time was spent on design and requirements. As such, Storyboard is a semi-structured job that will require refactoring (especially to handle multiple database formats) and possibly the inclusion of a MVC tier like Stuts. At the moment some good parts of Struts design have been knicked.

Program errors spew out onto the Stack Trace and error.jsp. Log4J will be the logging mechanism used (not the one in JDK1.4). All functionality is well tested so errors should only come from loss of database connections or malicious intent (e.g. incorrectly formed HTML requests). No test suite is yet in place (another thing to get around too).

Deployment Status

The Storyboard EAR will only run on:

  • Oracle 9iAS v903 OC4J
  • Oracle 9i RDBMS

The download contains:

  • Full source code (including JDeveloper projects and Ant build.xml)
  • EAR ready for deployment into OC4J
  • SQL script to create: tables, sequences, triggers, and some dummy data
  • Installation notes (TODO)
  • Documentation (TODO)

Packages not in the download, but required are: