Tharinda's blog

The requirement of the project is to create a blogging platform that allows users (admins) to create & manage content,
approve public comments and track site statistics

Design
The major specifications were:

• Admin is able to register/create new users/admins
• Links to the most recent posts (10 or so) are shown in the homepage
• Admin can create and edit posts
• A post contains a title, post text and a unique id, which corresponds to its direct URL
• The comments added by the public and approved by any admin will be shown in the post

URL	Handler	Auth	Functionality
/	index.jsp	None	Shows the posts (10 max) in reverse order. Has buttons for logging-in, adding posts, viewing statistics
/ClickedPost?id=19	ClickedPost (servlet)	None	Shows the plaintext (or HTML) of the post with title and a comment box
/PendingComments	PendingComments (servlet)	None	Stores the new comment in the corresponding JSON file but does not show it yet in the post
/newpost/approval.jsp	approval.jsp	FORM	Shows the list of posts which point to the comments-approval page
/newpost/Approval?id=19	Approval (servlet)	FORM (above)	Shows the authoring admin name, a button to view the pending comments and a link to edit the post
/	index.jsp	None	Shows the posts (10 max) in reverse order. Has buttons for logging-in, adding posts, viewing statistics
/	index.jsp	None	Shows the posts (10 max) in reverse order. Has buttons for logging-in, adding posts, viewing statistics
/newpost/commentsApproval	commentsApproval (servlet)	FORM (above)	Shows the list of approval-pending comments with checkboxes to approve and a submit button
/newpost/edit	editPost (servlet)	FORM(above)	Shows textboxes to edit the current title and text of the post with a submit button
/newpost/commentsApproval	commentsApproval (servlet)	FORM (above)	Shows the list of approval-pending comments with checkboxes to approve and a submit button
/statPost?id=19	statPost (servlet)	None	Shows the corresponding post’s title, its total view count and the number of comments

Security


Authentication
We used form authentication to authorize the admins/writers at the loggin-in page (see above). The admins need to

add the entry for the users at tomcat-users.xml.

Non-standard Libraries Used

• json-simple/simple-json was used for accessing (change & read) post JSONs
• As the name suggests and with similar requirements of the system, this seemed sufficient
• Plaintext or CSV files and even XML formats were considered, but eventually this was selected becuase it seemedmuch more simpler

GIT- https://github.com/tharinda221/BloggingSystem