Project Option 1: Blogging System

The blogging project is a client-server Web application built over an RDBMS. Blogging, short for web logging, is an application that runs on a portal site, in which different users (and user groups) can publish and revise daily journal entries, and these entries will be made public for others to view. In essence, it gives everyone his or her own personal editorial column to publish to the world.

Blogger.com, owned by Google, is the biggest blogger system around. You should experiment with this web site to see how many of the basic blogging operations work – but use this as a beginning point, not an endpoint, for your blogging design. Bloggers often use simple XML files to store the blogging entries; we hope to be more sophisticated.

Your blogging system should have the following features:

• A client for creating and updating blog entries. The client can be written in a number of different ways, ranging from a Java applet that runs in the web browser, to a PHP interface, to a custom Java or C# client that runs on the client side. The client should publish blogs using an XML-based protocol such as RSS, Ruby, etc. Blogger has a published API, using XML-RPC, that you may find useful for reference. You might also want to experiment with using “web services” to do this, or Java RMI, or simple SOAP over your own HTTP interface, or …

• A portal site with a database backend. This portal site should present a main page from which people’s blogs can be accessed; it should show the most recently updated blogs; and it should provide a means of browsing different blogs. You may choose your DBMS (e.g., mySQL or Oracle) and servlet programming environment (PHP, JSP, ASP, etc.) to do this. Note that eniac-l has Oracle and mySQL, and there is a PHP server on fling; if you want to use department infrastructure, these are probably the technologies to use.

• A good schema design that is appropriate for the data being stored. Some of this data is simple and highly regular (e.g., user IDs and passwords); other data is somewhat less structured but may still have regular fields (e.g., the RSS/Ruby blog entries themselves). The server app may store the RSS/Ruby data in any format you choose: it may map from XML to relations, or just save XML, etc.

• Note that you will likely have both a server application (which accepts client “publish” requests and stores data in the DBMS) and a servlet application (which presents the blog information on the portal). The servlet application may present the data in XML (we will assume an XML-capable browser) or in HTML.

• It should be possible to alter the presentation (style) of each blog. You should be able to make use of XSLT and/or CSS to change the presentation. If you are running your own server, you can use Apache Cocoon to render XML into HTML via XSLT.

• You should have a security and authentication model that ensures each user has a login and password, that they can only alter their own blogs, and that they can authorize other users to modify their blogs.

• Time permitting, you may want to allow for more sophisticated models of querying, perhaps exploiting some of the SQL features to, e.g., query for the most recent entries by a particular blog author, etc.

Additionally, there are many opportunities to add extra capabilities such as text search, different modes of browsing the logs, etc.

Useful resources for reference:

• O’Reilly and Associates maintains Safari, which has a number of PHP references that you can freely access and use.
• You may want to use the SOAP and WSDL specifications to create “web services” at the server end and to access them via your client. Note that there are a lot of tools that will do all of the work automagically: Microsoft Visual C# and its tools automatically generate web services, as do tools for Java Web Services (which has a tutorial) and
• You may want to use the Eclipse programming environment for Java.
• You’ll want to know about the Java JAXP parser framework for parsing XML.