simplecenter is open sourced
Posted by Matt Brotherson in asides on November 7, 2006
This is old news, but simplecenter has been open sourced. What does that mean? To me it means I can get newer versions and customize it to fit my needs. To others it means that the group at simplecenter hope to make it the iTunes and WMP alternative.
I own a Rockford Fosgate Omnifi system purchased from woot more than a year ago. The device has served its purpose well – streaming MP3′s wirelessly from my PC to my hifi system. The only downfalls it has are that the device does not have a digital out interface and that there isn’t a neat touchscreen remote that will work from various rooms in the house. As well, it does not support flac and has a limited database that allows only ten thousand MP3′s to be added to the library.
Earlier this week I figured out how to hack the version of simplecenter shipped with the Omnifi to allow more than ten thousand songs – a little editing of a properties file within the jar file that housed the application’s code. However, I still wasn’t pleased with the operation of the application, using a large XML file to store the media library. I did some looking and saw that the Omnifi support direct from Omnifi has all but disappeared and that simplecenter has open sourced their code. Read the rest of this entry »
hibernate and subclasses
Posted by Matt Brotherson in code on November 2, 2006
Another challenge that presented us in developing our current product was persistence. Upon the recommendation of our architect, we chose Hibernate. Hibernate is a great tool for persisting model objects to nearly any data source you could imagine. The base implementation with our Data Access Objects (DAO’s) was straight forward.
We didn’t want to create an overly large schema for storing objects so when we started getting into subclasses we looked for a solution to handle subclasses and store them in the same table as the superclass. Luckily Hibernate can handle this as well. The only downside to our approach was that we ended up with a table that has columns for all the properties of each subclass with not-null set to false. This means your data integrity will have to reside in your manager objects.
truelicense licensing framework
Posted by Matt Brotherson in code on November 1, 2006
One of the things a commercial application needs to protect intellectual property as well as avert piracy is a licensing component. As the application I’m managing is a java based web product we naturally needed a java based licensing framework. Our answer was found in TLC – an open source licensing framework that offers everything from license creation to license verification.
The tutorial(s) leave a little to be desired from a custom implementation perspective, but after several emails to the creator (note: send emails to the mailing list, not him directly!) we were able to get past the issues left unclear by the tutorial. The framework makes it so simple to use a private key store to generate a license and then distribute your application with the public key store for verification of the license.
Our implementation in a web application utilizes a servlet filter to read the license file, verify it and then install it. It’s really quite simple and we ended up with only four class files to implement. A SWT client was created to generate the licenses for our purchasing and trial customers.
Another note: the framework also included support for a ‘free trial period’. We chose not to use this as we wanted to keep a strong grasp on where our application was installed, but the ‘ftp’ option looks promising.
Anyone in need of a licensing framework for java, check TLC out!
welcome
Posted by Matt Brotherson in announcements on October 17, 2006
This site is the debut of my (Matt Brotherson) blogging about the various adventures encountered in software development and consulting both from a managerial perspective and a coder.
Enjoy your read and add your two cents if appropriate.
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