GSoC: Hackystat July 13-20

Client Authentication is Made of Lose and Fail.

Okay, so it's maybe not that bad, but I'm definitely having much more difficulty with it than I had anticpated. In some ways I think it would be significantly easier if I had put it in from the beginning, as in having to go back through and make my client and resource code work with the authentication, I managed to break things pretty badly. The biggest difficulty that I have conquered so far was the Mailer. I'm using gmail as my smtp server, and I could not for the life of me get it to authenticate properly. As far as I can tell, the original Mailer code for the server does NO authentication. How is that even possible? Anyway, I tried a couple of different ways to add in the authentication for the mailer, but it was a variation of the following code from GaryM at the VelocityReviews forum thread on gmail as an smtp server that finally got it to work.

public class GoogleTest {

private static final String SMTP_HOST_NAME = "smtp.gmail.com";
private static final String SMTP_PORT = "465";
private static final String emailMsgTxt = "Test Message Contents";
private static final String emailSubjectTxt = "A test from gmail";
private static final String emailFromAddress = "";
private static final String SSL_FACTORY = "javax.net.ssl.SSLSocketFactory";
private static final String[] sendTo = { ""};


public static void main(String args[]) throws Exception {

Security.addProvider(new com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.Provider());

new GoogleTest().sendSSLMessage(sendTo, emailSubjectTxt,
emailMsgTxt, emailFromAddress);
System.out.println("Sucessfully Sent mail to All Users");
}

public void sendSSLMessage(String recipients[], String subject,
String message, String from) throws MessagingException {
boolean debug = true;

Properties props = new Properties();
props.put("mail.smtp.host", SMTP_HOST_NAME);
props.put("mail.smtp.auth", "true");
props.put("mail.debug", "true");
props.put("mail.smtp.port", SMTP_PORT);
props.put("mail.smtp.socketFactory.port", SMTP_PORT);
props.put("mail.smtp.socketFactory.class", SSL_FACTORY);
props.put("mail.smtp.socketFactory.fallback", "false");

Session session = Session.getDefaultInstance(props,
new javax.mail.Authenticator() {

protected PasswordAuthentication getPasswordAuthentication() {
return new PasswordAuthentication("xxxxxx", "xxxxxx");
}
});

The code highlighted in red I initially left out, because I didn't know what it did. Leaving it out causes the whole thing to fail, so obviously it's important. The code highlighted in green is what is missing from the SensorBase Mailer that makes me think that the SensorBase mailer doesn't authenticate before sending emails.

So, the mailer was a somewhat frustrating goose chase. Now, the goose I am chasing is an "Undefined user null" error. Not an exception, mind you. I think it's a status message that's being set somewhere in code that I don't have direct access to (my best guess is somewhere in the restlet router or guard stuff.)

So, currently, the client authentication has stalled at the retrieving data part. You can register new users all the live long day, and it will send them emails with their login credentials. However, if you try to get information as an authenticated user, it finds you in the database, sees that you're properly authenticated, returns that you are a user and are okay to access the data... and then fails.

Hackystat Client

The hackystat client will allow the users to specify which project(s) and time frames they want to allow SocNet to access, through a simple little gui. (Only contiguous time periods can be selected for a project, so not like, two weeks here and then another two weeks later). The thing left to decide is... which telemetry data to use? What are the most common/most useful analysis?


This week:

Finishing the client authentication is the biggest deal, followed by finishing the hackystat client. I'll be sending an email to the list to get input on what telemetry analysis are the most useful, as well.

Additionally, I'm going to take a crack at the continuous integration stuff Philip has encouraged us to work on, so that will be a couple of new and exciting toolsets. I'm particularly excited about checkstyle.