What is a friendly URL?

Since I started to really use the internet, about 13 years ago, I liked to bookmark useful and interesting links for later access. Of course my bookmarks list has been growing steadily ever since and it’s become difficult to just LOOK for some bookmark on a topic I remember I might have added to the list. So I do it the Google-way, I search for it by typing some relevant words. Besides tags and good titles, URLs that contain some of the words I look for, land at the top of the search results. The same is valid for search engines, who favour friendly or well constructed URLs.

Source code for this post is available on Github - podcastpedia.org is an open source project.

1. Why Mybatis?

Short answer: simple, lightweight, open source, dynamic sql and sql control, previous iBATIS knowledge. Now let me elaborate a little bit on the subject. Back in the old days of Podcastmania.ro, see Story of Podcastpedia.org, I used my own MVC like framwork based on servlets to develop the web application and plain old JDBC to access the database. After “upgrading” to Spring MVC, I started using Spring’s JdbcTemplate for database access, which removed some of the boilerplate code. Later I got involved in projects where database access occured via iBATIS – Hibernate was there for a long time, but because of legacy reasons and no database normalization whatsoever, iBATIS was the optimal choice. By about the same time MyBatis had been just launched, so I read the documentation, did a pilot, liked it and switched from Spring’s JdbcTemplate to MyBatis. In the mean time I’ve been working on projects with Hibernate and JPA 2.0 with Hibernate used for persistence, so I’d say I have a pretty good overview on the most popular Java Persistence Frameworks. You have currently four major options:

• JPA/Hibernate
• myBatis (former iBatis)
• Spring JDBC
• JDBC

Source code for this post is available on Github - podcastpedia.org is an open source project.

1. Why use Caching?

Are you aware of the Pareto principle, also known as the 80-20 rule, which states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes? Well, this principle also holds true for Podcastpedia.org, where most of the traffic is driven by some of the podcasts, and only some of the search criteria are used the most. So why not cache them?

For application caching Podcastpedia uses Ehcache, which is an open source, standards-based cache for boosting performance, offloading your database, and simplifying scalability. It’s the most widely-used Java-based cache because it’s robust, proven, and full-featured.

This post presents how Ehcache is integrated with Spring, which is the main technology used to develop Podcastpedia.org

Source code for this post is available on Github - podcastpedia.org is an open source project.

Why use reCAPTCHA?

We have a section on Podcastpedia.org, called Recommend podcast, that allows visitors to submit podcasts. Lately we have received very good suggestions – thank you all you Guys for that, but also lots of spam. A way to signifactly reduce the amount of spam, is to use captchas, which is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether or not the user is human. One popular implementaiton of captchas, is reCAPTCHA, now owned by Google. You might thing that solving catpchas is annoying, but by using reCAPTCHA you help to digitize books, newspapers and old time radio shows – here is a greatd TED talk from Luis von Ahn on massive-scale online collaboration explaining how this works:

Last but not least, you help us avoid email spam, which I guess you know by now how annoying and dangerous that can be.

This post presents how reCAPTCHA is integrated with a Spring MVC form to recommend podcasts.

Source code for this post is available on Github - podcastpedia.org is an open source project.

Podcastpedia.org uses the MySQL database, in version 5.5.32 (# mysql -V),  to store metadata (title, description, update frequency, url of the image, urls of episodes etc.) of podcasts from the directory. The database contains both MyISAM (for performance and full-text indexing capabilities) and InnoDB tables. An upgrade to version 6 and only to InnoDB tables is considered, once it’s mature enough and GoDaddy will support it. This post presents how MySQL server is configured, and to be more specific how the my.cnf file looks like.