trajano's Journal: Wrote my first RAR module

Well I finally wrote my first RAR module. Its pretty flimsy, but it seems to work. Its a NNTP client, which just uses the apache commons-net stuff to do the actual work.

My impression with RAR/JCA stuff is that it is basically a way to pool instances of objects such as connections to EIS or News servers. Not really rocket science, and overkill for most apps, but important thing is that it gives you free connection pooling with your J2EE server.

I haven't really gotten it to work in WebSphere, but I have it working on JBoss (which is good enough for me, I think if I really needed to do it in WebSphere I would be able to).

It got me to thinking of how I can make my own BNR program in Java. Of course the way I am going to do it will be ridiculously overkill, no one really needs all the J2EE stuff to build something that just downloads binaries from newsgroups. But what the hey, its a learning experience.

I was thinking of using CMP entities to handle the database stuff (BNR uses its own database mechanisms which keep on getting fubared often) this way I can delegate the database stuff to people who know what they are doing (or so we hope).

The connection to the newsgroups are done via JCA which I have already done, somewhat, it still needs to be more parametric, right now everything is hardcoded into my news server.

The next thing I need is a YEnc + UU decoder which I can download off the net. Then create MDBs that would do the decoding work. That way its asynchronous. There will also be another MDB that reads the data from the NNTP server and creates a file. It will send a message to a Topic to inform components that it has finished downloading and created a new file.

The UI will be either a SWT/Swing based applet or something that gets executed by Java WebStart.

Well when I have something more concrete, I'll probably start off another sf.net project for this.