CSCE 590N: Problem Set 3

Due: Tuesday, 4 May 2004, @midnight

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Architecture

Figure 1:A deployment view of your servlet. It shows two instances of your servlet running on different machines and being accesses by a single user.

An Online Distributed Sharing Library

In this problem set you will implement a servlet slighltly similar to PS1. In this problem set, we assume that each person is running their own servlet-enabled webserver and wants to run an servlet that will allow them to enter and display to the world the books they own along with some personal information (input by the person) and some other information (gathered from Amazon). The owner of a servlet can enter the books he owns. For each book he can say whether he owns it or not and, if he owns it, whether it has been lent out and, if so, when he expects it to be returned. The owner can also enter URLs for SOAP services of other servlets. The servlet will then query these via their SOAP interface (which you must define) whenever anyone does a search. That is, when a user (owner or not) does a search on the servlet, the servlet will search its own databse as well as query the other SOAP services it knows about asking them to do the same search on their local databases.

Requirements

The specific requirements you need to satisfy are:

Technology

  1. You will be using Amazon web services. Namely, their SOAP version. You will need to download their toolkit and register with them for a token. Here is their WSDL file.
  2. You will be using Tomcat and Axis
  3. You will be reading and writing information to an XML file that obeys the bibtexml-strict.dtd. Here is a sample XML file that obeys this DTD. Note that you do not need to use all the fields provided by the DTD (namely, you will only be storing books) but those fields you do store must conform to the DTD. More information on this DTD can be found here.

User Interface Functionality

  1. Only the owner can add books. You can hardcode the user/password of this one user in the code. But, make sure you tell us what it is.
  2. The dialogue to add a book first asks the user for some keywords then the servlet does an Amazon title search on that and show the user all the matches asking him to pick from one. The user can then pick one, hit "Add" and the servlet adds that book to the database.
  3. The search dialogue asks the user (anyone, in this case) for some keywords. The servlet then does a search on its local database of books and ask all the other servlets that it knows about to do the same search.
  4. There is another dialogue that asks the user to enter the URLs of the SOAP services provided by other copies of this servlet running on other machines. These are used when performing the search from step three.
  5. The page that displays a book must contain
    1. title
    2. author
    3. isbn
    4. the medium sized image of the cover
    5. the list price
    6. the status of the book: who owns it, and for each of those whether they have lent it out or not
    7. at your discression, you can display more of the information that Amazon provides (reviews would be nice!).

SOAP Interface

  1. As you've gathered, your servlet also exposes a SOAP service. This service consists of one call to do a keyword search on the local database and return any hits. You can use ISBN numbers as the unique identifiers.

Submission Instructions

As will all the problem sets, you will hand them in using our department's dropbox. You will hand in:

  1. a .war file that is ready to run (assuming Axis is already installed),
  2. a README file should be part of that directory and include the academic integrity statement below and step by step instructions on how to run your servlet using three machines,
  3. when first started the servlet should read an XML database that you provide which contains 10 books.
Name(s):
email(s):

I understand that it is the responsibility of every member of the Carolina community to uphold an maintain the academic standards and integrity of the University of South Carolina. Any member of the University community, who has reasonable grounds to believe that an infraction of the Code of Student Academic Responsibility has occurred, has an obligation to report the alleged violation.

I certify that I have neither given nor received unauthorized aid on this problem set.

Questions

Q:Are we required to have user logins for each individual wanting to search our database or is the owner the only one required to login? Also, who is allowed to enter the URLs of other SOAP services?
A: Each servlet should have one "administrator" account. Only the administrator is allowed to to enter URLs. Everyone is allowed to search, without the need to login.

José M. Vidal
Last modified: Mon May 3 10:06:01 EDT 2004