need advice on beginning a new Cocoon based project called XMTrader

[Josema Alonso <jo...@josema.net>]

Dear all,

Finally I could start a 100% Cocoon based project. I've been developing web
applications using scripting languages, mainly ASP on the server and
Javascript on the client, for some 4 years now. I always try to use them the
cleanest possible way; unfortunately it's always a mess at then end of the
project. Being the XML fan I am I should change to Cocoon or any other XML
framework someday :-)

This project is known as XMTrader - eXcellent Music Trader. This is not any
kind of P2P software.
I'm a music fan and I'm lately involved with some fan communities which want
to share legal music in a lossless format. The music sharing is done by way
of FTP servers maintained by individuals, where kind people store the files.
They are very concerned about security issues so these servers and some
communities are closed to the general public. FTP servers are usually
filtered by IP, user name and other variables, and accounts are only given
to people who have been introduced by some member of the community; though
anyone can ask for an account on any server. The contents or the server are
displayed on web pages that FTP admins must update by hand on a week by week
basis.

And here comes myself with a solution to automate those tasks. So these are
the goals this project should accomplish and how I think I could do them,
and this is where I need some expert advice:
1.- A portal for FTP admins, members of the community and general public.
This will let users communicate, ask FTP admins for accounts and see
listings of the content of FTP servers. The latter is the most important
feature of the project and is explained more in details below.
I think I could use the Portal & Authentication components and XMLForms for
this task. Since some parts of the web site should be protected and I'd need
to develop many pages with forms for the users to configure the site the way
they want.
2.- A look account will be created for all the servers. This account can
only see the contents of a server. Some kind of indexer should iterate
through all the servers and get their contents in a daily basis to show them
on the portal. So, members of the community could see there the contents,
even the contents of servers where they do not have an account created. But
his should be configured by every FTP admin in the portal.
My intention is to make a collection of XML files conforming to a XML
Schema. Every XML file should have the contents of one of the servers. I'll
query all of the servers once by day, maybe using some servlet and extending
the DirectoryGenerator (can I query remote directories?) and creating the
XML files locally, we are almost agreeing on a naming convention for the
directories and files. Then I should give users the chance of querying this
structure by server, artists, songs, etc. What should I use? XIndice,
Lucene???

This is just the beginning. After that I hope I could add more modules to
the application. We have tons of ideas on how to improve the day by day
community experience.

Well, that's all. Oh, what a long message...I'm sorry. I tried to explain it
in short...hope you could understand it and if not, please let me know what
I should explain more in detail.

Thank you very very much for reading.




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