gnizr-feedUniversity of Maryland, Baltimore CountyCMSC 691S/491S

Paul SwensonAlice Carback

Presentation AgendaProject Selection

Project Idea

Considerations

Plan and Design

Project Goals

Initial Prototype

Simplified View of Database

Implementation Details

Core Gnizr Mods

Backend

Frontend

Complications /Known Issues

Conclusions

Lessons Learned

Future Work

Project SelectionAlice Carback

Project Idea #1• Create a News Feed feature for gnizr

• Level of Challenge: 4

• Develop a new “Community” page that displays the latest user activities in a News Feed page similar which featured in Facebook. User activities may include events such as editing bookmarks and tags, changing bookmarks’ geotags and subscribing to new RSS feeds.

Considerations

Do you want to introduce social networking capability?

Do you want to provide certain privacy protection feature?

How can you effective arrange the display of similar information, so that the News Feed page will not look too cluttered?

Plan and DesignAlice Carback

Project Goals

Create a feed feature similar to the one on the Facebook homepage that provides community members with an overview of the latest activity

Users should be able to see- Bookmark postings- Feed subscriptions- Folder modifications- New tags and users

Initial Prototypegnizr-feed mockup

Simplified View of Databasethese are the tables we looked at using

Implementation DetailsPaul Swenson

Core Gnizr ModificationsAdded created_on field to tag table

Updated createTag stored procedure to set created_on field to NOW() when tag created

Added newsfeed to the tab bar by editing gnizr-ui-menu.properties

Overloaded gnizr-config.xml with a custom version to change database name + db authentication

BackendCreated class for handling data (FeedItem)- Uses customized DAO (FeedDao/FeedDBDao) to

collect data- Process data for output- Send data to template

Stored procedures rather than raw SQL

Still used most of Gnizr: changed only as needed

Worked around having to modify other Dao objects by creating a single custom Dao to encapsulate new functionality

FrontendReused gnizr icon graphics

Added feed action as community page

Feed page output had two stages- Output every “event” on its own line- Clump time-similar “events” for cleaner look

Clean, readable design

Frontend - 2

FeedAction class is leveraged multiple times

Used to provide data to main gnizr-feed FTL (via FeedDao)

Used to provide data to RSS gnizr-feed FTL (also via FeedDao)

ComplicationsPaul Swenson

Known Issues - 1

• Common issues that we also encountered:

Learning curve for frameworks

Properly using external resources folder

Initial database username/password

Documentation spread out among a number of different web sites, not always clear where to go for help

Known Issues - 2

Set up Tomcat on personal server- Directions provided mostly for running on

Windows via Eclipse

Environment issues: Linux vs. Windows- Some configurations were different“Knowing” Java not a sufficient pre-requisite, requires in-depth knowledge of Maven build chain, Spring and WebWork frameworks

ConclusionsPaul Swenson

Lessons Learned

Gnizr has many interesting features

Take your time to learn the frameworks

Schedule enough time to meet for the project

Difficult to see potential without people

Future Work(gnizr-feed 1.1!)

• Given more time, we would enhance gnizr-feed with the following improvements:

Better (smarter) output- number limit of results- better grouping of result types

Privacy settings

More social features (friends, fans, comments, etc)

Prettier, better commented code

Eliminate hardcoded values, store configuration settings in an xml file that users can overload/edit

Demo!!! + Questions???Paul Swenson + Alice

Carback