Re: [Ginp-developers] Architectural Questions

[Doug C. <do...@cu...>]

Brian Burch wrote:
> Doug, I wonder whether you can help my understanding of the ginp webapp 
> by correcting any mis-apprehensions I might have?
>
>
> 1. ginp.xml defines the photo directory list to an instance of the webapp.
>   
Yes.  You define your root folders, which are your "Collections".
> 2. All users browsing the same webapp (context) navigate the same set of 
> photos because they all "share" the same ginp.xml.
>   
No each root folder has an optional user/password restriction.
> 3. No matter what you tell the configuration wizard about your existing 
> or new ginp.xml, the file that is actually used to find and show 
> pictures MUST exist as /ginp/WEB-INF/ginp.xml.
>   
In the current 2 year old release you can set the location of your
file.  This (in my opinion) is not ideal.  I started to rewrite the
wizard to get rid of Tapestry and its dependencies, and to fix the
location of the con fig file in %WebAP_context_Name%/WEB-INF/ginp.xml

> 4. ginp.xml can point to more than one "Collection" of photos, each is 
> found in the local filesystem (but normally outside the webapp directory).
>   
Yes.
> 5. The Collection logic assumes you will have a 3-deep file hierarchy, 
> e.g. 
> /path-to-some-directory/individual-photo-directory/one-or-more-jpegs. 
> You need to represent your "complete collection" of photos (however it 
> might really be organised) as a set of 3-level Collection objects within 
> ginp.xml.
>   
No.  Multiple depth is possible.  Define the root in ginp.xml and the
ginp does the rest.  folders and files are read directly from the file
system.  Only thumbnails are stored in a special sub-directory in each
folder.
> 6. The ginp.xml file is read during each webapp startup - it is NOT 
> currently cached as some kind of persistent object that survives a 
> tomcat restart or deployment of a new war file.
>   
True.  Read at configure during startup.  It's persistence comes from
the file on the disk.
> 7. Does the security stuff work? i.e. shouldn't a Collection defined 
> with users and/or administrators only be viewed after a logon has been 
> forced? (This doesn't seem to work on my system, so I currently add 
> security constraints to ginp's web.xml to make tomcat enforce my access 
> rules.)
>   
Should work but the wizard does not create the file correctly.  In the
old days (last release) admin users could edit a XML file that contained
data for the folder.  I removed this feature because I wanted to use
EXIF or a database to store data.  This work is not started.
> 8. The setup application (only?) uses Hivemind and Hibernate to create 
> an external  persistent representation of ginp.xml as a java object. 
> Does it work? Is the persistent object ever used outside the 
> configuration wizard? How does this all relate to the use and 
> maintenance of the "real" ginp.xml file?
>   
Hibernate was written out (or should be).  Hivemind did work but I never
finished the conversion of the wizard and do not understand how best to
use Hivemind.
> ---------
>
> One of my reasons for suggesting that we refactor the setup logic into a 
> maven sub-project was to help clarify these issues for anyone looking at 
> the code for the first time.
>
> I really don't know how much of what we have now is mainline logic, how 
> much is work-in-progress, and how much is abandoned experimentation.
>   
Me neither.  which is why Hibernate got cleaned out and Tapestry too. 
All we need is an HTML form to write an initial config file.  Hivemind
is very interesting but need to be understood and I just did not get
round to this.

Sorry this is a mess if you need help let me know and I can clean it up
a bit.

All the best,

Doug
>
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