mindshare

GlobalConfig.cfg

I spent a day building a configuration registry system for Mindshare. Basically it’s a wrapper for the java.utils.Properties class. It allows you to get and set values that are strings, bools or ints, which is convenient. A single abstract class handles all the file access code. If you get or set a non existent member an assert is triggered. It can even automatically upgrade configuration files if the keys in the current file don’t match the expected set of keys. This will be great when I start changing the config files and ship incompatible versions to testers, they won’t even notice things changed.

This config work was necessary for doing basically everything that the windows registry can do: save GUI element positions, save network settings, save peer identification info and so on.

Next up on the agenda is getting mindshare to connect to the Jxta network and join the world group. This requires some upfront work to configure the peer. It needs to know where the rendezvous and relay peers are. Luckily Jxta.org has a simple solution for this; you can pull them down from their web server via a cgi script:
Rendezvous Peers
Relay Peers

Tomorrow I’m going to write the code to fetch these lists and continue reading though the Jxta book.