lucasmelin / droppod

A podcasting application built in JavaEE

DropPod

A podcasting application built in JavaEE usinng Servlets/JSP, AJAX and MySQL.

Purpose

Droppod was a 5 person team project for my CST8218 Web Enterprise Applications class at Algonquin College.

This project was an opportunity to learn how to build scalable, enterprise-ready web applications, with a design focused around internationalization and horizontal scalability.

What we learned

To achieve site-wide translation, we used a combination of resource bundles for menu strings, and Google Translation API for dynamic content such as podcast names and descriptions. In order to minimize the number of requests to the Google API, the translated strings were stored in the database so that future requests could be served using only the database.

Screenshots

droppod's Issues

Confirm account creation VIA email tokens

We can possibly use the MySQL uuid() function to generate the tokens.

checking rss feeds for updates daily

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Save translated strings to the database

Related to #20
When we query the translate API, we should save the resulting data so that we can return the information from the database on subsequent queries, rather than hitting the translate API for every single request.

Confirm account creation via email

Users signing up should be able to enter an email address and receive a registration email.

We could also generate a unique value for each user, and emailing the user a link to the account verification page containing their unique value as a query parameter. If the link is visited, the account is set as verified in the system.

Incorporate album art into player

The individual podcast thumbnail should be parsed out of the RSS feed and displayed along with the currently playing audio.

Parse info from RSS feed into proper db tables

User should be presented with a submission form. After entering a valid RSS link, the podcast info should be parsed, and the podcasts and episodes tables should be populated accordingly.

Add playlist queue

Users should be able to queue individual podcast episodes, creating a playlist instead of listening to a single episode at a time.

Changing language after login/signup error causes application to fail

Application reaches HTTP status 405 if you attempt to change the language after an error occurs on both the login and signup pages.

Signup takes too long, multi thread email

Integrate Google Translate API

Translate the RSS provided strings using Google translate API. Since we can't control all the strings directly, and therefore can't provide adequate translations, integrate the Google translate API to handle this instead.

MySQL throws exception when episode description contains emoji

Since emoji are outside the basic UTF-8 mutilingual plane, when adding characters outside this plane such as emoji, MySQL throws an exception.

The solution appears to be modifying the row encoding type to be utfmb4.

See: MySQL docs - The utf8mb4 Character Set

Create signup page

Need a page for users to sign up to droppod. Ideally, we would generate a temporary UUID upon creation, and email that to users so that we can verify their account info.

ISO-8859-1 vs UTF-8 encoding mismatch

Em dashes and other special characters display as ? on HTML pages.

MySQL column defaults to UTF-8, whereas JavaEE prefers ISO-8859-1. Simply modifying the meta, content-type and encoding tags to UTF-8 in the HTML does not solve the issue.

Add email verification for users

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Add french login page

Requires adding french and english resource bundles and properly configuring the login servlet to pull the text from the appropriate bundle.

Might also be a good idea to have a sevlet dedicated to changing the language site-wide for the user.

Avoid having to sign in when already authenticated

Currently, there is no way to skip the login page, even if the user is already authenticated. We should be able to verify if the user is logged in. If they are, they should redirect to the welcome page, otherwise, they should be redirected to the login page.

Utilize client sided password hashing

We don't want to store user passwords in plaintext, so we need to use the salting+hashing libraries on the passwords before storing them.

This also is needed in the login page, since we'll need to be able to verify the hashes as well.

Sanitize HTML input

When parsing RSS feeds, sometimes descriptions and other text fields contain unwanted HTML tags. A basic regex filter is in use, but is not a complete solution, since HTML is not a regular grammar.

Possible fix for this would be to add a JSoup dependency and use Jsoup.parse(html).text();

Add podcast thumbnails to welcome page

Display a list of podcast thumbnails along with some basic info about each on the welcome page after login.

Requires querying the db and returning appropriate dynamic html.

Add basic user page jsp

Individualized profile pages for each registered / validated user.

Foreign key not unique

The droppod db schema has a non-unique foreign key "podcasts_id".

Rename the column to match convention, and change associated Java calling code to use the new column name.

Allow user to select their geographic location

Requires the database to be populated with cities and countries, and include a set of dropdowns to set the user's country.

Internationalize account creation page

Waiting on #7. Infrastructure is in place, just waiting for a finalization on the English strings so that translation can be done.