I found the pixory personal image server on the hibernate-devel mailing list this morning. It looks like a regular web-based photo album, but seems to offer client side tools as well. You can checkout the screenshots if you want to get right to it.
Pixory is a personal image server based on Hibernate and HsqlDB.
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Pixory allows you to store your photos on your own pc but to access, compose
into albums, and share them anywhere on the internet. It's your personal
online photo sharing service, running on your computer using your broadband
internet connection. Pixory is a client and a server, a lightweight web
application for browsing photo collections on your hardrive; an album server
to your friends and family or anyone on the internet. It simplifies
accessing and organizing photo collections on your home network.
Today was a pretty awesome day in my development life. This morning started off great with the "remember me" feature, and I also implemented the Nested tag library from Struts. It was great - took me all of about 5 minutes to implement and get nested, indexed iterating of child objects in a form. I ended the day with disappointment as I tried to save this form. That's when I discovered that XDoclet wasn't generating getter/setters for my indexed getter/setters. I might actually have to put a form in my source tree to get this functionality. So far, all my ValidatorForms are still generated from POJOs, which Hibernate uses. Not all my POJOs are run though XDoclet -- some are generated using Hibernate's Reverse Engineering Tool. It actually seems to take less time to write the mapping file than to mark up the POJO with XDoclet tags. If you generate it with the RET, it's like taking candy from a baby.
Speaking of babies, I started to learn a new language tonight. I call it Abbie-blah - it consists of making grunts and groans and sticking your tongue out. I swear I had an intellectual conversation with Abbie - I had her smiling like you wouldn't believe. Fun times.
I have to thank Erik for the idea of implementing "remember me" functionality. I just implemented it this morning on my current project, and it's already saving me time. I used to have to re-login each time after I re-deployed. No more, just refresh!! I love it - thanks Erik!
BTW, I ended up fixing the saving-bad-password problem by adding another cookie to the mix. This one is called authenticated and is set by my ActionFilter servlet, which filters my protected resources. Good stuff - I'll be adding it to struts-resume, and possibly Roller (is this a good feature to add?).
I woke up this morning, and had the simple intention of blogging about one of my favorite tools, The Color Schemer. If you're a wanna-be designer like me, it's awesome. It helps you match "like" colors and also allows you to select any color on your screen. It's one of my most invaluable web design tools. Putting a tip about this was my only hope at 4:30 when I sat down at this computer. Now it's 5:39.
Why am I still here? I got caught up in reading the Colorado Bloggers mailing list - which actually got some traffic yesterday. This is one of the first times I've received a message from the list. One of the members pointed me to a another Photo Album for the web. It's called Gallery and she has an example setup. Looks like it runs on PHP. Well that shouldn't have taken me an hour, right?
The activity that's filled my last hour has been wrestling with Erik Hatcher's request for "remember me" functionality in a J2EE app, using container-managed security. The good news is that I did get it working - here's how:
- First, I added a checkbox called "rememberMe" to my login.jsp. When the user clicks "submit", I do some JavaScript logic. This logic entails saving the username and password as cookies - but only if the rememberMe checkbox is checked. If rememberMe is checked, a cookie is set called "rememberMe" with a value of "true."
-
Using Roller's BreadCrumbFiler (maps to /*), I added some logic to check for the existence of the "rememberMe" cookie, and if it exists, to route the user to "j_security_check?j_username="+usernameCookie+"&j_password="+passwordCookie.
This all worked fine and dandy right off the bat - took me about 10 minutes to implement. The problem was that a user couldn't "logout." So I've spent the last hour (now it's been an hour and 1/2) with my own ignorance trying to delete cookies (and doing null checks and such) so users could logout. And I just got it working - fricken sweet! What a way to start the day! The only problem I could see now is if a user tries a username/password and selects "remember me", but then closes their browser. The BreadCrumbFilter will keep trying to authenticate them - yep, I just verified that that's a problem. It's also a problem when they enter an invalid password and select rememberMe.
One way to solve this is to not set the "rememberMe" and "password" cookies until someone has successfully authenticated. Maybe I could use the breadcrumbs in the BreadCrumbFilter to check the last URL accessed, and if it's already j_security_check, don't do the routing. Anyway, here's the code that does the heavy lifting in BreadCrumbFilter:
Cookie rememberMe = RequestUtil.getCookie(request, "rememberMe");
// check to see if the user is logging out, if so, remove the
// rememberMe cookie and password Cookie
if (request.getRequestURL().indexOf("logout") != -1 &&
(rememberMe != null)) {
if (log.isDebugEnabled()) {
log.debug("deleting rememberMe-related cookies");
}
response =
RequestUtil.deleteCookie(response,
RequestUtil.getCookie(request,
"rememberMe"));
response =
RequestUtil.deleteCookie(response,
RequestUtil.getCookie(request,
"password"));
}
if (request.getRequestURL().indexOf("login") != -1) {
// container is routing user to login page, check for remember me cookie
Cookie username = RequestUtil.getCookie(request, "username");
Cookie password = RequestUtil.getCookie(request, "password");
if ((rememberMe != null) && (password != null)) {
// authenticate user without displaying login page
String route =
"j_security_check?j_username=" +
RequestUtils.encodeURL(username.getValue()) +
"&j_password=" +
RequestUtils.encodeURL(password.getValue());
if (log.isDebugEnabled()) {
log.debug("I remember you '" + username.getValue() +
"', authenticating...");
}
response.sendRedirect(response.encodeRedirectURL(route));
return;
}
}
I can post the code for RequestUtil if you need it. The class RequestUtils (for encoding URLs) is a Struts class.
