All about QFlicks

Hi people , this post is all about a project which I started roughly a month ago by the name of “QFlicks”. It was named so because the graphics library I chose to use is the popular Ot and the  application is a movie collection cataloger which scans the disk for media files and gets film informations (duration, plot, cover ,rating ,poster cover , casts  etc) from the popular Amazon’s http://imdb.com or the Internet Movie Database . It also allows the user to filter his possessions based on movie titles,genre,ratings  , seen or unseen etc.

The later versions of the software will witness subtitle downloader extention and many more.

Here are the basic features which I plan to inmplement in version 1.0

• Scanning user-chosen directories to find media files (films in a first time)

Status : Done

How : Used a recursive OS walk algorithm to extract movies from all folders , sub-folders , sub-sub folders etc.

• Extracting film titles from file names (tough one if files are not properly named)

Status: Done

How: Using Neural Network algorithms and and basic Regular Expression.

• Create a list of these names in a database get films information (duration, plot, poster cover , rating , casts etc) from imdb

Status : Done

How: Used a library named IMDBPy as imdb.com does not provide and API (Another example of Amazon’s miserness). The database used is MySQL which experienced developers feel is a wrong choice for desktop.

• display films list and information of the selected one

Status: Done

• basic settings handling

Status: More or less done until someone comes out with bugs

• Filtering based on genre , title ,rating seen or unseen etc.

Status: Not Done

To Do: Learn multiple substring search in SQL ( SQL sucks , I hate it)

• Clean and simple gui

Status : The Gui is simple but not clean and hangs as I have not implemented the Multi-threading

To Do : Learn Multi-threading and make the network call fuctions run in separate threads in the background and also need to implement customized Progress Bars for UI

Plugins (towards upper versions):

• subtitle downloader
• playlist manager
• automatic new files inclusion (directory survey)
• music album and video series handling

Tools Used:

• Python as the Programming Language
• Qt as Graphics Library
• QtDesigner for the Gui
• SVN as versioning program
• MySQL as database software
• IMDBPy as the library
• GPLv3 licence

Here is the screen-shot of my Work :

The sourceforge Link for the project is :

http://sourceforge.net/projects/qflicks/

Get the source from the Repository :

svn co https://qflicks.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/qflicks qflicks

Current OS Support :

Gnu/Linux with Qt >= 4.5 and MySQL >= 5.0

Newbies who don’t know how to use SVN or are facing problems with code can mail me at

mailto: abhii.cse.nitdgp@gmail.com

The project is likely to see its first release on 24th of August 2009

How to create IPS packages for OpenSolaris

Creating IPS packages for Opensolaris consists of four important steps :

1. Building the package using common method like, make, make install and figure out the dependencies.
2. We need to have a build environment (CBE) [ one time step ]
3. We need to write a spec file
4. We will use pkgtool to generate IPS
5. Building the environment for development

Prerequisites:

Install sunstudio compiler using the command

pfexec pkg install ss-dev

Install the following required packages similarly

• SUNWgnome-common-devel
• SUNWperl-xml-parser
• SUNWgnome-xml-root
• SUNWgnome-xml
• SUNWgnome-xml-share
• SUNWdoxygen (optional)

Installing the Common Build Environment

Download the CBE(Common Build Environment) from :

http://dlc.sun.com/osol/jds/downloads/cbe/test/

Ensure you select the correct architecture. Once downloaded, extract the contents from the tarball. To install run cbe-install. This needs to be run by a user with Primary Administrator privileges. Users wishing to run and CBE once installed successfully should have at least Software Installation privileges. Privilages are easy enough to add, by either manually editing the /etc/user_attr file or using usermod(1) with the -P CLI option.

Download latest pkgbuild from here :

http://pkgbuild.sourceforge.net/download.php (version >= 1.3.98, for generating IPS packages)

CBE 1.7+ includes a version of pkgbuild which at the moment does not generate IPS packages. If you just want to compile packages and generate SVR4 packages then there is no need to perform this step. Use the installed CBE to build the downloaded latest pkgbuild package

$ cd pkgbuild-1.3.98

$ ./configure –prefix=/opt/dtbld/

$ make

$ pfexec make install Set the build environment

$ . /opt/dtbld/bin/env.sh

Get existing spec files to play around with: svn co svn+ssh://anon@svn.opensolaris.org/svn/jds/spec-files/trunk spec-files-trunk

set the build environment by sunning the following script.
$ . /opt/dtbld/bin/env.sh

Building the package and Generating IPS

pkgtool –download –ips build-only SFEjoe.spec

 

Before executing the above command the local repository must be setup to run at localhost:80 using

svcadm enable pkg/server

 

for IPS repo on http://localhost:80 )

Creating Spec files

 
How to write a spec file: http://jucr.opensolaris.org/help/spec_file

Base spec file:

http://jucr.opensolaris.org/help/base.spec

Source Juicer:
http://jucr.opensolaris.org/home

 

My First Session On Netbeans IDE and J2SE

This was the debut session conducted by me as a CA . In the first part of my Demo I covered many topics related to Netbeans Intelligent Text Editor and showed them techniques like Code-Insertion , Code-Refactoring ,Using Javadoc , Live Code Parser and error checker , Local History , Code completion , Instant renaming , Compile on Save,and lots of other cool stuffs. I explained them how to use the Profiler and the Debugger. I explained them the use of Version Control and automated testing (Unit Testing) .

This was followed by a basic demonstration on the Swing Gui Builder and with functionalities like Automatic feedback , Quick Component Insertion , Anchoring , Alignment . After this I expained the basic features of event handling and demonstrated it with a small application built using the Swing Builder .

As people asked for more meat so I continued out of my plan to demonstrate them easy Data Binding using MySQL database , JTable and Java Persistence API showing them how to createa CRUD application in 5 mins! On audience demand I also showed them how to import an existing PHP-MySQL project in Netbeans and showed them advantage of using WEB 2.0 frameworks like JMaki and Dojo directly into the existing PHP project. I gave them an introduction to Visual Web Java Server Faces by demonstrating them how to populated a Woodstock Table from a MYSQL database using simple drag-drop.

Many obvious questions like why Netbeans over Eclipse which I think I answered satisfactorily. Many people came to me afterwards asking more details about multibooting Solaris and more about Web 2.0 and AJAX. I was on the top of the world when people actually clapped at the end of the talk. All in all a nice experience.

Here are some of the pictures from the Session