Mike's Notes

I’ve completed the last todo list for the running club message board, including a few extras that I added on the way, but have also added many more things to my mental (as in held in my mind, but maybe also MENTAL) todo list, so nows I good time to write them down so I can tick them off as I go.

1. Tidy up code, not aiming for it to be perfect but having the luxury of just hacking away with getting functionality working quickly as the main driver it could do with being tidied up before attempting anymore work on it.
2. Templating: At the moment theres hardcoding, so will only work for one messageboard, but I want to set up another one for testing, one for demonstration, and also another running club have one that is still on the old PHP code so would be nice to update that, shouldn’t be too hard, be nice to just have a properties file that I can switch.
3. Use Github: I’ve been using Codesion for some subversion hosting, but the pricing doesn’t really make sense for small projects that aren’t expected to make any money, so having used up my allowance of projects I’ve resorted to backing up a zip file. Github looks good, I’m happy to make the code public, and also feel like I should make the effort to try Git.
4. Allow login through other services – google/twitter/yahoo etc., I don’t like Facebook so be good to  not be encourageing people to use it even more.
5. Make the login system create actual users and generally be better, it works as it is but its about as basic as you can get – you’re logged in or not, but everyone effectively logs in as same user, but just gives a different name to their post.
6. Admin users – need to be able to have administrators that can delete posts etc.
7. Allow editing of posts/replies you’ve just created,  not sure about going back and editing old messages, but should be able to use the session to allow editing of something that’s just been posted, which is when people normally spot typos.

That will do for starters, got loads of other stuff in I’d like to do, be good to start using it as a basis for trying / evaluating different technologies – and brushing up things I’ve got on my CV. For example using JPA, Spring, Shiro. Then be good to try a Ruby version, a google app engine version and things I’ve only just heard of Node and Mongodb …

A Facebook app that’s worse than Farmville is also on my mental list.

Got Facebook login working yesterday.

It’s been a while since I posted so thought I should do a quick one whilst I’ve got time.  I’ve got an idea to go back over the various tasks involved in getting the message board running and write them up as proper “how to” blog posts that might actually be useful to someone, or at least me if I forget how I did it.

Anyway, I got facebook login working, after a bit of googling and reading through the facebook developer documentation. I have resorted to dropping the Spring login stuff, which I’d used to allow ajax logins to work with standard J2EE security. As I couldn’t find away of getting the standard J2EE security to work with logins from Facebook (not facebook specific – would have had the same problem with any OAuth login I think). I did try the new(ish) HttpServletRequest.login method available in Servlet API 3.0 – Tomcat 7.0, but found it only seemed to login that request, not the session, so when the response redirected the user to the message board after the facebook login they were still logged out as far as the session was concerned. So I’ve done what feels like a quick hack and just stored a “logged in” flag in the session.

I will investigate Apache Shiro, http://shiro.apache.org/ , an alternative to J2EE security. I’m not convinced J2EE standard is flexible enough for most uses I’m likely to come accross in the real world, but maybe I’m missing something, but it seems as though the creator of Shiro thought the same.