OpenBoard

Status of the Project

billfraser — 2005-09-09T01:58:06-04:00

Yes, it's been a long time since I posted anything here.

Things are very busy lately, with applying to college and my senior year of high school to think about, and I've realized that I can't develop OpenBoard in its current state fast enough for it to be useful. At the current rate, by the time the IPB 1.3 emulation is working, it will be nearly useless.

The solution? Change direction. OpenBoard's core is very robust and it'd be a crying shame to just throw it away, so for ...

Database Engine Restructuring

billfraser — 2005-01-25T23:02:56-05:00

I'm currently in the middle of restructuring the entire database engine system.

I realized how nasty the code was getting, and I think I can do a better job. Among the reasons for this are the fact that I need the database engine subdivided into reading and writing classes, which the previous structure did not easily allow for. Also, I realize that my naming scheme is beginning to be as inconsistent as the Invision Board databases themselves, thus negating one of the main purposes of ...

Development Lag

billfraser — 2005-01-21T00:21:31-05:00

I apologize for the recent lack of CVS commits. School has been very busy and I simply haven't had time to devote to meaningful coding. In case anyone was wondering, NO, the project is not dead, it's just moving very slowly right now.
Not helping things is the fact that I have a major case of programmer's block and haven't been able to really concentrate on much of anything lately, but that will pass. However, my rather intense school schedule will get worse before it gets better, so if ...

2005

billfraser — 2005-01-01T02:30:53-05:00

Happy New Years!

Here's to making 2005 a great year.

Cheers!

Happy Holidays

billfraser — 2004-12-25T23:26:34-05:00

The houses are lit, snow is sprinkling down, and for a brief moment, all is right with the world.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays everyone!

Re: OBSF Skin Engine Work

billfraser — 2004-12-20T23:58:15-05:00

Some more work on OBSF today. I've implemented paging support for the forum view and topic view functions, so when the total list of posts goes beyond 5 (excluding the main post), they'll be truncated and there'll be a link to the other pages at the bottom of the page.

Nifty, eh?

I also touched up the RSS 1.0 skin engine so that it fully conforms to RSS 1.0 reccomendations including message length (it's cut as close to 500 characters without going over and without splitting ...

OBSF Skin Engine Work

billfraser — 2004-12-17T22:46:06-05:00

I've done some work on the OBSF skin engine and the default OBSF skin recently, making several changes throughout. Most importantly, the showuser() function is now fully implemented, so you can view user info for any registered member (try it out by viewing mine). I also tweaked some of the HTML in areas such as the post headers and I've added the ability to tack on arbitrary HTML to the end of the forum ...

Focus Change

billfraser — 2004-12-02T10:25:15-05:00

I've decided to change the goal of OpenBoard from simply cloning Invision Board to a much more broad one. Read the intro for the specifics.

OpenBoard Powering OpenBoard

billfraser — 2004-11-27T22:15:15-05:00

As of today, OpenBoard is now the system running the OpenBoard home page. To facilitate this, openboard.sourceforge.net now redirects to openboard.vonetwork.com since SF.net is unable to run OpenBoard due to much too old software.

This site is using the OBSF skin engine which was designed specifically for this purpose. It's a unique way of displaying a message board so that it looks more like an informational website.

The site is currently in read-only mode, since OpenBoard ...

MAIN

billfraser — 2004-11-27T21:51:30-05:00

OpenBoard

Public ViewCVS Access: http://cvs.sf.net/viewcvs.py/openboard/OpenBoard
Pserver-based CVS Command: cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sf.net:/cvsroot/openboard checkout OpenBoard
Nightly CVS Snapshot: tar.bz2

SoapClient

Public ViewCVS Access: ...

Re: Nightly Automated Builds

billfraser — 2004-11-27T21:44:35-05:00

Instead of relying on SF.net's cron service, I'm using another machine's cron combined with SSH to run the scripts automatically anyway. This is really annoying, but whatever - it works.

SOAP Message Redesign

billfraser — 2004-11-27T21:42:24-05:00

I wasn't very happy with the performance of the SOAP server/client communication method used thus far, so I've redesigned it so that communication with the server is based on HTTP instead of basic TCP streams.

Basically, the old method involved having the client start a php script on the server (via http) that would open a TCP listening port on the server which could be used to transfer messages. The problem was, many hosts don't allow the creation of arbitraty ports on the server ...

Java Web Start version now available

billfraser — 2004-11-27T21:35:44-05:00

SoapClient has been updated to recognize when it's being run in a JNLP environment (like Java Web Start) and it will open browsers for links instead of copying the URLs to the clipboard.

I've also made a jnlp file so the latest version of SoapClient can be easily run from Java Web Start. The signed jar-file used by Java Web Start isn't updated as regularly as the nightly build, mainly because I have to sign it myself, but it should be updated often enough.

To try it out with ...

It's ALIVE!

billfraser — 2004-11-27T21:32:46-05:00

The client finally works 100%! I just finished writing the daemon thread that listens for and handles incomming messages, and it works just as it should. The only tasks remaining now are error handling, UI enhancements, and I'm thinking of adding a configuration dialog.

I could really use some bugtesting as well. Download a copy and try to break it. Try inputting bizarre text in an effort to get it to make strange error messages. I hope to have all possible error conditions ...

Nightly Automated Builds

billfraser — 2004-11-27T21:30:19-05:00

I've written a script that will build a .jar file of the program every night, but until SourceForge gets the cron service running again, the jarfile will be updated whenever I can get around to building it. You can get a copy of the jar file here and to run it, just run java -jar SoapClient_nightly.jar in the directory you downloaded the file.

Please feel free to ...