gnizr-feed University of Maryland, Baltimore County CMSC 691S/491S Paul Swenson Alice Carback

Presentation Agenda Project 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 Selection Alice 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 Design Alice 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 Prototype gnizr-feed mockup

Simplified View of Database these are the tables we looked at using

Implementation Details Paul Swenson

Core Gnizr Modifications Added 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

Backend Created 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

Frontend Reused 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)

Complications Paul 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

Conclusions Paul 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