Polaris: Universal Communicator

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Polaris Universal Communicator

• Manager/Developer Eric Hessels
• Assistant Manager/Developer/Installation Jean
  Lord
• Project Packaging/Developer Thomas Cheah
• DB design/Developers Juan Cruz, Terry Fong
• Developer Kevin Tan CW
• Developer James Le

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Project Goals

• The goal of Polaris was to integrate several
  communication technologies into a central
  location
• It was designed to be a web based project
• All efforts were made to complete Polaris in the
  time allowed

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Description

• Polaris integrates Webmail, Forums, Chat Rooms,
  Instant Messaging, News Bulletin Board and Course
  Folders into a web browser
• The Polaris development team consisted of 7
  members each with quite diverse backgrounds
• Each team member worked on independent sections
  which were all merged together in the final
  development stages

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Competitive Analysis

• Reason for development
• - Polaris was designed to make it easy to use
  basic communication services on any operating
  system through a simple interface
• Strengths
• - Polaris used standard web development
  technology specifically designed to work for our
  intended purpose ie. JSP, JAVA, HTML
• Weaknesses
• - The inability to control operating system
  environments sometimes caused unexpected results

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Polaris Daemon

• The Polaris Daemon manages much of the core
  functionality of the Polaris System
• This is a multi threaded server
• The server listens for pulses from the Instant
  Messenger and if it does not receive a pulse
  from any given client for more then two minutes,
  the user is automatically logged out

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Polaris Interface Daemon Console
List Of Active Threads
List Of Active Users
List Of Active Rooms
Transaction performance measure.
Server Log area
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Polaris Interface Daemon Console
Daemon Console Viewers
Room Viewer
System User Viewer
Active User Viewer
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Polaris Interface Login
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Polaris Interface Navigation Bar
Polaris Site Navigation Buttons
Polaris Instant Messenger Applet
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Polaris Interface Bulletin Board
Home For Normal Students
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Polaris Interface Bulletin Board
Home For Users With Bulletin Modify Permissions
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Polaris Interface Instant Messenger
Friends Currently Online
Friends Currently Offline/Invisible
Visibility Settings
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Polaris Interface Instant Messenger
This Users Friends List
Polaris Web Population List
This Users Blocked List
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Polaris Interface Instant Messenger
Message Window
Visible History View
Normal View
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Polaris Interface Chat System

• Active Tabs
• Console ( system messages )
• Lobby (default)
• Rooms the user has joined

User's In Room This is a list of users that are
currently chatting in the highlighted room.
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Polaris Interface Chat System
Chat Area
List of users in this room
Message Composition area
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Polaris Interface Forums
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Polaris Interface Forums
Message List
Available Newsgroups To Be Read
Read Selected Group
Subscribe To Selected Group
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Polaris Interface Forums
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Polaris Interface Forums
Message Display
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Polaris Interface Web-Mail
Polaris Inbox
Account Selection
Message
Select For Deletion
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Polaris Interface Web-Mail
Message Composer
Attachment Area
Path To File
Attachment List
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Polaris Interface Web-Mail
Message Viewer
Attachments
Message
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Polaris Interface CS Courses
CS Course List
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Polaris Interface CS Courses
CS Course Page Student
Only available to students registered in this
course.
Links relevant to the course
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Polaris Interface CS Courses
CS Course Page Academic Staff
Only available to TAs of this course
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Polaris Interface Admin
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Technology

• Polaris Development Tools
• Java Applets (SDK 1.3)
• JSP
• HTML
• Oracle DB
• Tomcat
• Javascript

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Implementation Challenges

• - Windows/Solaris Development
• - Large team (coordination)
• - Java Threads/Synchronization
• - Netscape/Internet Explorer JVM
• - Security problems using UDP in Internet
  Explorer (bug in Internet Explorer on handling
  UDP sockets)
• http//support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scidkb
  EN-USq186032

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Lessons Learned

• - Start Early
• - Dynamic port numbers
• - Cross platform compatibility