Chungles

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 02:30:00 +0000

0.4 Release

0.4 has just been released and can be found at the usual place. There will be no more source releases as it's become too difficult and complex to prune the source tree and produce simple, easy to set up builders. The source is still available in version control and 0.4 is tagged in the mercurial repo.

In this release, Chungles has now become a framework with UI delegated to plugins. There is now a specific OS X version with a full cocoa interface to handle threading issues created by the new layout. Notifications are now delivered when a remote client is sending or retrieving files. The SWT interface displays this as a balloon. A growl plugin will be released soon to provide notifications for OS X. The windows installer can now automatically retrieve and install a Java JRE if you do not have one, making Chungles easier to distribute.

Various plugins will be released as they are finished separate from releases. This release will appear similar to the last with the UI bundled for the appropriate OS with the core. It launches out of box with the UI configured and ready to go. The next release will include a security framework to allow authentication and permissions for files and directories, as well as basic plugins to handle username/password authentication and access control lists.

At some point I will try and release a working WebDAV plugin for 0.4. Most of it is working, just not on windows ;)

Enjoy!

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 17:35:00 +0000

I recently gave a presentation on Chungles at an ACM meeting at Louisiana State University. For all those interested, I've uploaded the slides here.

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 06:01:00 +0000

Plugins Update

Chungles has been split up in to core functionality (a dumb server) and UI/Generic plugins. SWT and console UIs are now plugins, in separate modules on the repository. Several things need to be tweaked for the whole plugin framework, but for the most part, it's done and working and rather simple to use, in my opinion.

As for the WebDAV plugin, progress is coming along great. It's nearing completion as I have it successfully listing files using the OS X built-in DAV filesystem driver, Nautilus and CaDAVer on Linux, and Windows Vista's mini-redirector. Windows XP's mini-redirector, however, is giving me some troubles. There are some bugs listed, mostly the port numbers not working, but I suspect there are other bugs in their code, not just mine, since there are issues with the WebDAV testbed. MS apparently has a hotfix, but you have to contact their support to get the files, and they will not have a downloadable update until the next service pack, so unfortunately, my recommendation to get WebDAV on Windows for now is to use Vista.

The WebDAV plugin is done by embedding Jetty, providing it a full webserver, and pages are handled through a servlet, which serves regular HTML pages. So far the GET method is fully implemented, the PROPFIND is almost completely implemented, and the PUT/DELETE methods needs to be implemented before it's entirely functional. Through my work on this plugin as well as the plugin framework for Chungles core, I have worked heavily on a convenience class that treats the Chungles network as a virtual filesystem, which should aid many other plugins, providing simple methods for accessing files and directories through unix-style paths.

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 26 Dec 2006 09:07:00 +0000

Plugins

I'm now revamping Chungles to be mostly plugins. I've split off the UI to plugins now and I'd like to lay out frameworks for other parts of chungles such as networking (have standard mDNS, manual adding of nodes, samba, multicast, so on), searching (for server end, this will allow basic file searches, regex file searches, metadata searches, so on), and security (encryption and authentication layers as well as ACLs). I'm finishing up the preferences for plugins and much tweaking will be needed to ensure proper classpaths are set and project building is fairly simple.

The plugin system right now loads JARs in to the classpath at runtime via XML configuration inside the JAR. It will search some default locations for JARs, and then load them if an existing classname isn't loaded, then load JARs from the main XML, then write to that XML. I'm working up convenience classes, like the FileSystem class, which will treat the Chungles network as one big hierarchy and allow simple methods to traverse and utilize it. I'm considering adding Javascript support since Java6 now supports Javascript parsing, and possibly PERL for those die-hards.

Finally, I'm working on a plugin that will allow what I've been contemplating how to go about from the start. The plugin is an HTTP-server with WebDAV support. This will allow most platforms to mount the new Chungles hierarchy as a virtual filesystem. Since everything's a plugin, this will be an optional system, and later I can implement native filesystem drivers.

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 02:21:00 +0000

0.3 Released

0.3 is now in the usual places. The big feature of this is working multicast transfer support. One can now send a file out to multiple recipients using the multicast button in the toolbar. There is now a tab for multicast options in the preferences window. I've added a flow control option so the user can reduce dropped packets. By default this is turned on and set to 1mb/s. There are also some minor tweaks here and there. The system tray has a popup menu and the abort functionality works on transfers (except multicasts). Gentoo ebuilds are also up. Enjoy.

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 08:20:00 +0000

Mac OS X Troubles -- Resolution

So I apparently made a rather large oversight. My problems with OS X lie within flow control, and in experimenting with such, I disregarded that being the problem after testing on one machine which I've never had any success testing anything on. Testing some code on my macbook, flow control worked and packets were delivered. On to 0.3!

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 20:20:00 +0000

Mac OS X Troubles

In the process of adding multicast file transfer support to Chungles, I'm seeing success on linux and windows, but odd issues with mac. For some odd reason, when I send out a file via multicast, an enormous number of packets are dropped, far beyond anything reasonable. A lot of times the initial header packet won't even get sent to the multicast group. Even more odd, macs receive multicast packets just fine. I've tweaked every imaginable setting I could, and tested on 10.3.x and 10.4 with a cluster of XServes on a very reliable network and on my macbook. So I guess it's off to hunting down some apple guys to see if they have any insight. This is the main thing right now holding up the 0.3 release.

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 22:19:00 +0000

Gentoo Portage Overlay

There's now a portage overlay released in the downloads. To use, download the latest tar.gz, extract, set the PORTDIR_OVERLAY environment variable to the extracted directory, and 'emerge chungles'. Enjoy.

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 03:33:00 +0000

0.2.1 Released

0.2.1 has just been released in the usual places. This is mostly a bugfix release. Here's some highlights:

There is now a system tray icon for Chungles. Clicking it will toggle the main window's visibility.
The preferences window's textboxes are fixed so you can read the text you enter
Changing your computer name will update on the network and in main window
Chungles handles corrupt config files by writing all values parsed and the remainder the default values to the file

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 23:59:00 +0000

Status of Multicasting

So the multicasting feature of Chungles is nearing its finish. I now have an implementation in subversion. It transmits all packets via multicast/udp first, then tells the main chungles server to listen for connections for 30 seconds. The client will go through and retrieve packets regardless of the order they come in and write to the file in their multicast share folder. After retrieving through multicast/udp, it opens a connection to the host's tcp server and requests the missed packets. Upon completion, it will send the UI a notification of whether it was successful or timed out.

In the process of adding to the preferences, I have fixed some little display issues. The text box was too small, and the Ok/Cancel buttons were a little whacky. I'm going to try and add some refresh features and do some UI tweaking, maybe make a 0.2.1 release.

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 20:11:00 +0000

System Tray Icon

There's now a system tray icon for Chungles in SVN. Clicking the icon will toggle the visibility of the window. I'm thinking about setting up some UI settings to enable/disable the icon and set behavior of it.

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 23:55:00 +0000

Killer Feature

So I'm in the process of setting up a new way to send files through chungles -- via multicast/UDP. What does this mean to those who don't know what multicasting is? One transfer, multiple recipients. That is, user A can make one transfer at the speed of one transfer (theoretically) to users B, C, D, E, and so on. I'm really excited about this feature as it'll be ideal for situations where you want to share something with all your friends or colleagues but don't want to go through either setting up a server which will require several simultaneous transfers, or bringing a usb thumb drive to everyone's computer, etc. Chungles will have the option for a multicast share folder where multicasted files can be stored and the UI will have a button which allows the user to multicast a file to all chungles clients on the network.

The only trouble with multicasting, which has UDP often referred to as unreliable, is that packets are often not delivered. In the case of file sending, every packet needs to arrive, so I have to develop a fallback system. I will probably use the default chungles TCP server for the fallback mechanism. I figure if you're sending a 500mb file to 20 users, with a packet loss rate of 1%, you have to resend 5mb of packets to 20 people (=600mb total sent), which is better than having to send 500mb 20x (=10GB total sent) over a reliable protocol.

I'll hopefully have a rudimentary version of this in the SVN repository soon.

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 08:25:00 +0000

Windows Installer

I've added a windows installer for the 0.2 release. It should make things a little bit easier to use on windows.

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 23:00:00 +0000

0.2 Released

I've just finished releasing 0.2 to the appropriate places. It's tagged in SVN and on the download page. Let me go over some of the highlights of 0.2:

Mac OS X app is now universal binary. 0.1 had SWT libraries and a java application stub that were only for PPC (though the application stub could be run in rosetta, the jnilibs couldn't).
ToolBar with basic file operations - download file(s), upload file(s), delete file(s), create new directory, preferences, and quit
Right-click menu with basic file operations
Updated protocol with new operations
Better error handling
Binding to interfaces multi-threaded when requested (in SWT, you can use chungles right away and don't have to wait for all the interfaces to be bound to)
New UIs - There's now a console UI and a null UI, just pass --ui=... switch
Executable JARs - try double clicking chungles.jar to load it (not that big a deal, but nice)
Lock file - if multiple instances of chungles are running, only one will bind to your network interfaces
SWT interface cleaned up a bit - added borders, changed layouts, etc

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 22:59:00 +0000

SWT Woes

So in the process of adding the toolbar to Chungles, I noticed the icons were displaying kind of funky on OS X. It looked like pixels were mixing. Upon further inspection, I found out that SWT was not honoring alpha pixels for images set to ToolItems properly. It would just display alpha bytes as completely transparent for that pixel. I submitted a bug report to the Eclipse team and they promptly fixed it. I built the latest CVS source and it works and looks great. The fix will be included in the next milestone of development releases I assume, so for those of you who have run in to this problem and would like a nice prebuilt binary, here you go, enjoy.

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 23:30:00 +0000

Upcoming Release (0.2)

So the next release (0.2) of chungles will look something like the teasers, but different icon sets and I added some borders and things here and there. There will be the toolbar with basic file operations (and the same operations available in a right-click menu).

In addition to that, I've added two new UIs to the mix. I think the UI system is set up fairly well right now, but not yet good enough to have a plugin interface. There's now a console UI (for the shell junkies) and a 'null' UI which is good for sending to the background. I've also added a lockfile to prevent two servers from starting up. The lock file is a null file stored in ${HOME}/.chungles/.lock. If it exists, chungles starts up as a pure client, no serving.

As for bug fixing, I've covered some large bugs, and still many to go. I know there's rather large and silly bugs in there, but I'm focusing on getting basic features taking care of, and then I'll start doing bugfixes. Please, if you see something break in chungles, send me an email (rammerhammer at gmail dot com) with a description of what you were doing and the error java throws. This will help me (and you) a lot.

A final note, the latest revision of chungles in subversion works with the latest release of SWT so for those of you with intel macs, it will now work. 0.2 will be released with the universal binaries for SWT.

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 21:26:00 +0000

Teasers
(real update to come soon)

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Wed, 03 May 2006 01:40:00 +0000

Free time soon? Next week I'll be finishing up finals and school for the semester. This means I'll have a couple weeks to myself before I do an internship. I'm getting overwhelmed by the things that need to be fixed and the things I'd like to add to chungles on top of school and work, so I've decided to ask for developers to help make chungles great. Anyone interested, feel free to drop me an email. I welcome all help.

The next release won't be too big. As soon as transfer issues such as a connection interruption and aborting a transfer are resolved, I'll be releasing 0.1.1. Also, I've modularized the code more. I finally divided up the code to packages and split off the UI and core functionality from the main application. This will allow cool things in the future like daemonization fixed and better, Swing, ncurses, etc as well as laying out the structure so that other applications will be able to use the chungles protocol (native file system support!, etc).

After I get the 0.1.1 bugfix release out, I would then like to start focusing on a user authentication layer in the core. This will probably be a never ending piece to chungles as I'd like to add things like MD5 challenges, SSL, PAM, LDAP, Active Directory, and so on. There's going to be focus on just making it exist for now.

Finally, I'm thinking about redoing this ugly site. If I have enough spare db resources, I'm thinking I will redo chungles.com as a wiki using mediawiki. This way, all the necessary information will be in a familiar way and it will be simpler for me to edit and throw stuff on it.

I really need to multi-thread myself ;)

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 17:43:00 +0000

Send/Receive support should be complete. I decided against dragging files from a node to wherever. The way it would've been with that would involve using a temporary folder and I just don't like that. So instead, if you start right clicking things in the window you'll pick it up rather quickly how to grab files off another node.

Expect a 0.1 release very soon.

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 06:35:00 +0000

Last post, October 8th. Wow. Well here's a few updates of what's gone on with chungles the past few months:

Development has been slow. I got back in school and back to work. Every now and then I sneak away from benchmarking strange systems and helping fix mac clusters to write a few lines for Chungles. There have been some things done, just still far too much to do.

Firstly, I'm migrating from CVS to Subversion. I should've probably done this a long time ago. Subversion is insanely cool and CVS pisses me off a lot. I took down the CVS link from the project page. Everything should be working on SVN now, but if it's not, feel free to email me. I'm going to try and have everything laid out so that using subclipse you can import everything from the repository and build it easy.

Now in the repository, you might notice two new directories - stateless and jnistateless. This is what I've been coding up recently (instead of finalizing little things in the main Chungles... sorry). So one of the things I said I'd like Chungles to be is a framework. Part of the reason why is this subproject - Stateless Chungles (I haven't thought of a better name yet -- suggestions?). I was talking with a guy a while back about various projects and he talked about his primary focus of work - stateless applications. He mentioned the idea of being able to record a state and move around programs to other machines and pick up where they left off. This is a cool thing in grid computing I'd like to bring to desktops. Idealy, I want Stateless Chungles to be able to drag a program on a local machine to a remote machine; that is, freeze a program on one computer, ship it off to another, and thaw it out. I want to make Chungles the swiss army knife of networking on the desktop.

As far as what's done with Stateless so far, there's not a whole lot there. Some initial code is written and committed. The jnistateless folder contains a nifty little bridge for Chungles and native applications wanting to use Stateless. It's got a configure script and will build a jnilib and install a header file for applications wanting to implement a stateless app. The functions right now are primitive and lacking, but they're there and working. I have classes written to successfully load both native and java stateless apps. It's not finished, however, but I may have something to demo off using it soon.

The last thing is some more GCJ talk. GCC 4.1 is released and I've been working on getting a good set of cross-compilers installed on my system. I got a mingw32 and regular linux one going, but theoretically things should play well if I start producing some builds in GCJ with the same compiler for the big 3 platforms. I was reading some news about performance of GCJ versus JVMs. It's definitely something I want to have done. I think it was IBM that did a benchmark crunching prime numbers and the stats that stuck out the most to me were the time it took and the amount of memory used. Sun's JVM used something like 150mb where GCJ used 8mb. I'd really like to see how GCJ performs against python (so I can win the language battle at the office). Some have clocked Sun's new 1.6 JVM to be twice as fast or something of the like. Anyway, I'd definitely like to have nice native built versions of Chungles and expect to see some. I think a lot less people will complain about my choice in java when they need absolutely no dependencies or virtual machine to run it.

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Sun, 09 Oct 2005 02:22:00 +0000

Big things are coming. I wish I had more hours in a day, but good things will come soon enough. Right now I'm experimenting a bit with GCJ and just got SWT to compile. I might start redoing code to allow native builds of Chungles. I'm also thinking about redoing Chungles as a framework soon. This coupled with GCJ goodness should also allow integration with other languages. I would really like to see native mounting done with Chungles.

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Thu, 11 Aug 2005 23:25:00 +0000

I just found and fixed a bug involving win32->*nix file transfers. When the remote path was set after recursing through files, it kept the file seperator from the absolute path which would result in files created with a windows path name instead of the appropriate directories being created. New builds are up.

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Sat, 06 Aug 2005 23:40:00 +0000

There are builds now from the latest cvs workings up for download. The Mac OS X ones will now be done in stuffit. I fixed up the ant build.xml file and removed the classpath from chungles.jar's manifest. This will allow it to run easily with a batch file (included) for windows. Also the chungles-wontwork files have been copied to the chungles-cvs module seeing as they actually do work ;)

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Fri, 05 Aug 2005 00:19:00 +0000

A lot has been happening in my life right now as far as school and work go. At the moment I'm trying to find employment (anyone wanna hire me?) and trying to figure what I want to do with the academics. This, naturally, has caused the chungles development to go to nada. However I'm going to start picking it up again as of today. While I'm waiting to hear back from a few places I'm working on fixing a few bugs and adding some features like a progress bar for the receiving end, the ability to drag from a share (I'd really really really like to implement this and I'm still baffled as to how it's going to be accomplished), and adding remote IP addresses to the list of nodes.

What can you guys do to help me get a damn cool app to put on your thumbdrives? Well, for one, donations help. I'm unemployed, so money->food->code (FICO -- food in, code out). An even bigger help would be giving me a job. Stable flow of money->less time trying to find money for food->code! And last, submitting patches helps helps helps! If you see a bug, and you think you can fix it, why not fix it and send me a patch?

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Mon, 09 May 2005 06:08:00 +0000

Test Release

There's now a test release available (binary builds, source remains on cvs). It's available at the sourceforge site (chungles.sf.net) at the download page.

Some notes on this release:
- Only file sending works, you can't retrieve files yet. This will be added though.
- To do file transfers, you drag a file over from whatever graphical file management tool you use (explorer, finder, nautilus, etc) to the directory you want on a client.
- IP names will be replaced with share names
- To run, launch run.bat for windows, run.sh for *nix, and double click the icon for mac os x
- Bug reports/patches are greatly appreciated