Atreis Industries

Download from SourceForge.

I've been an a fairly heavy user of del.icio.us ever since it started.  At some point in the fairly distant past Yahoo! bought it out, which was okay, and then this year (2011) sold it off to someone else that decided to re-do it.  I went along with that change too, initially.  I noticed when the move happened that they didn't move over the tags.  I had quite a lot of bookmarks and didn't relish the thought of having to re-tag them all again.  I decided that, rather than do that on their site, I would just write my own and move everything into it and re-tag it there.  That way I would have some control over the stability going forward.

I spent two evenings putting together Atreis Mark, which replicated all of the del.icio.us functionality that I actually cared about.  I then spent some evenings over the course of another week adding in integration with Atreis Information Manager.

Atreis Mark Features:

These are pretty basic and straight-forward:

• Ability to add bookmarks (URLs), with a title, description, and tags.
• Show all bookmarks.
• Show bookmarks by tag.
• Show all tags.
• Sort the bookmarks and tags.
• Export to JSON (which is also the data storage format on disk).

That's pretty much it.

Atreis Information Manager Integration:

Most of the functionality of the desktop application, with a few additions:

• The plain text and RTF text (FancyText) data file formats have been retired.  Both are automatically converted to HTML text when you open them.  (This kept me from having to figure out how to display RTF on a web page.)
• Export data to JSON.
• Import data.

The only features I didn't replicate were the search and online help.

Installing and Running

Download the WAR file, and deploy it to a Tomcat or other application server instance.  (Tested with Tomcat 7.)

The WAR is built for Java 6 (tested on both the Oracle/Sun JRE and Open JDK) and Tomcat 7.  (I actually run this on a Tonido plug computer.)

Note:  If you don't know what a Java applilcation server is, and have never used one, please read the Tomcat documentation on the Apache Tomcat web site for information about how to get it, run it, and test that it's working.  Once you have it working you can deploy this application to it.

Integration

This is a bit more complicated than running just Atreis Mark...  (but still not too bad).

1. Use the desktop version of Atreis Information Manager some, if you haven't.  You'll want the data files from that before starting.
2. Copy the data files to the host that will run the server application.
3. Run an instance ot the Java RMI Registry on the server machine.  Do this by running: rmiregistry.exe (it comes with Java)
4. Run Atreis Information Manager in server mode.  Do this by passing it "server" on the command line: java -jar atreisIM.jar server
1. It can be helpful to create a script that starts the RMI Registry and the server all at once.
5. Test by running Atreis Information Manager on another computer that has access to the server:
1. Click "Open..." and choose the option to open a remote file.
2. Enter the IP address for the server.
3. Enter the port number, if you started the RMI Registry with a non-standard port.  (It defaults to 1099.)
4. Enter the full path to the data file you wan to open, from root.  e.g.  /home/myuser/atreisim/data/datafile.aim
5. Enter your password for the data file.
6. Open it.
6. If #5 doesn't work, look at the output from the server to see what's wrong.
7. Once this step is working, run Atreis Mark on the same host as the Atreis Information Manager server.  (It doesn't have to be, but it works nicely if it is.)
8. Go to the Atreis Information Manager option in Atreis Mark.
9. Select a file from the list, enter your password, and open it.

That's it!

Please note that both Atreis Mark and the Atreis Information Manager server have to remain running for integration to continue working.

Caveats and Plans

As indicated above, this application was written quickly.  So far, so good, but unlike the much older Atreis Information Manager, it's not yet stood the test of time.

That said, there are some known limitations that really ought to be changed if I get the chance:

• Load data on demand rather than holding all of it in memory all of the time.
• This is not a big deal for me personally since I'm not likely to have enough bookmarks that I'd run out of memory, but really, it should be pretty easy to make it more scalable.
• Create the ability to have accounts, and bookmarks tied to accounts.
• This should also include the ability to have private-only bookmarks.
• Enforce SSL for authentication and authorization.
• Add search to the exposed interfaces for Atreis Information Manager.