Lab 6

I did this lab in Netbeans and used a java libary that David Wilcox blogged about. It took me all 2 hours to finish this lab. I initially started it in PHP, but didn’t want to learn php gtk, so I just took advantage of the drag-n-drop functionality of netbeans, to create the UI. The code for actually approving the images/comments was pretty easy with this library, and boy did I appreciate using a statically typed language as opposed to PHP’s dumb errors that you only get to find out after you’ve ran the code, and in the process screw up some comments or images.

Lab 5

This was a breeze lab, after lab4. I found some really good tutorials on manipulating images with PHP’s gd libary. This lab didn’t take very long at all. One thing I would like to do (which is very simple) is to delete the images from my hard drive whenver I’m done storing them into the S3.
One problem I ran into with this lab is testing. Someone had left their image processing deamon running and I was never able to test mine live on the cloud. That issue replicated into another app server deamon, where messages were taken out of the /imageresults queue to the /approvalprocess queue. It turns out that the image description, submituser, and submitdate, were being put as arrays into the /approvalprocess sqs. It took me about a half hour to find out that before encoding the message into json, I had to enclose the description, submituser, and submitdate variables into double quotes so only the value got stored.

So, when creating the array instead of doing

$msg = array(…, ‘description’ => $description, …)

I had to do,

$msg = array(…, ‘description’ => “$description”, …)

Lab 4

Like for lab 3, I used PHP with the Tarzan libary to implement this lab. I had some rough patches along the way especially dealing with getting the images from the web server and putting them on to S3. Also, this was a good practice with the SQS queues for this lab.
The deamon’s weren’t so hard to write either. I just had all my deamons in separate files that would only run once, but had a deamons starter program that would loop endlessly starting up each deamon script every time through the loop.
Also, big thanks to Jeff Peters for putting the image and comment timelines all in one place, as they travel from the user through the different servers and Amazon aws’s.

Lab 3 – Implementation Notes

Lab 3 went pretty well. I used PHP to implement it with a library called Tarzan. Tarzan is pretty straightforward and has a very intuitive interface with some exceptions as far as documentation is concerned. After getting some pointers from Kekoa, I was able to finish it up quickly.

Currently, I’m struggling with Lab4, and have hit some dead end points so far, specifically using tarzan to send an image to S3 and creating new items in the domains. Tarzan is not very specific on this particular issue, so I don’t know whether I’m doing the right thing or not. Also, my extremely slow internet connection has been a pain to work on this lab.

appserver image submission

I’ve been thinking of several ways of generating the imagekey (and commentkey) but seems like there is some sort of convention going on. In fact, I don’t think I’ve seen any other format for these guids in our simpleDB other than “21a4ddf4-c23e-11dd-ad2d-123139026094″.
What are you guys doing to generate such things. I tried to see for a pattern, but can’t really tell so far. I thought about getting the IP and timestamp in milliseconds, concatenate them together to make the GUID, that would ensure uniqueness.