Photostream App – Part 2

In the the second part of the “Photostream” trilogy, we will look at how the server notifies all the clients who are observing its stream. There are 2 ways we can do this; either by using server sent events or with websocket.

Since JavaEE 7 supports websocket I’ll be using websocket. Websocket is a 2 way communication channel. In photostream app, the notification/data only flows on way viz. from the server to the client (those observing our photostream) so server sent event (SSE) is actually more appropriate. But to use SSE in JavaEE (in Glassfish/Payara in particular), you have to use add additional libraries.

In you’re using Glassfish/Payara and you would like to try SSE, see this document.

The source code for part 2 is available here.

Till next time.

Photostream App Trilogy

I’ve started a new screencast. In the screencast, I’ll show you how to develop a photostream application. The photostream application has 2 parts

1. Allow users to upload images

2. Push the newly uploaded images (a photostream) to connected clients.

The following is a list of open source projects and technologies that I’m using to write this application

• Servlet – file upload service
• Angular (and other modules) – front end client
• WebSocket – “realtime” notification
• Cordova – hybrid mobile application
• Ionic – an Angular framework

Rather than creating one long screencast, I’ve split it into 3 parts.

The first part – upload service and and Angular client.

The second part – server notification using websocket

The third part – hybrid mobile app to take pictures and uploading them.

Here is the first part

 

Some points to note about

• I’m using asynchronous Servlet to handle the file upload. This is to improve performance and to better utilize server resources by releasing the request thread when the image file is being persisted. We can resume the request once the file have been saved
• Since this is a simple application, I’ve saved the images directly in the document root. You should use a CMS or something like a GridFS to save your images

The source code for the first part is available here. Its a NetBeans project and it deploys to Glassfish/Payara.

Till next time.