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<h1>Meteozoom &mdash; Interview with Java Developer Mauro Cioni</h1>

<img src="../../../images_www/articles/interviews/mauro2.jpg" border="1" align="right">
<h3>Who are you? Tell us something about yourself!</h3>
<P><BR></P>

<P>My name is Mauro Cioni, I am 35 and I graduated in Computer Science
Engineering in 1996.</P>
<P>Currently I work in a software/consultancy company in Italy, where I am a
software architect for complex web applications; I also follow the
early stages of development to help others to start projects in the
right way.</P>
<P>I live on my own, and I devote a fair part of my free time to cycling
(both MTB and on the road), skiing, playing basketball and hunting
mushrooms.</P>

<h3>Have you developed web portals before?</h3>
<P><BR></P>

<P>Most of the jobs I do in my company is to design web sites/portals, mainly
on the intranet side. Sometimes I deal with portal products, but often
we start from scratch and integrate the customer’s existing
applications and services into our solutions.</P>
<P>Anyway, <a href="http://www.meteozoom.it">meteozoom.it</a> 
(and its siblings meteozoom.com and meteozoomblog.it)
are being developed on my own, completely outside from my job.
They’re definitely hobby works, developed in my spare time. I wish I
had more time for this, because I’ve got many ideas but little time.</P>


<h3>How did you get the idea for Meteozoom?</h3>
<P><BR></P>

<P>I’ve always been curious about weather and what the weather was like
around the globe, so I started looking at webcam pictures on the
internet as soon as they became available.</P>
<P>Then I started thinking that maybe it would be interesting to collect
these pictures on a regular basis for a further analysis in the
future, and for creating short movies of the weather evolution over
time.</P>
<P>At first I started by writing a small Java program that could read
pictures over the net and store them on the local disk, which was
running (and still runs) on a server permanently connected to the
internet.</P>
<P>This went on for years (from 2003 to 2005) then, when I started owning
tens of CDs of backup data I started wondering what I was storing
them for and why.</P>
<P>So the idea of putting everything on a website was the logical
consequence, and 2 years ago the first version of meteozoom.it came
to life.</P>

<div align="center"><p><img src="../../../images_www/articles/meteozoom/meteozoom.png" border="1" /></p></div>

<h3>And do you really store all webcam pics up to one year ago?</h3>
<P><BR></P>

<P>I actually store pictures up to more than 3 years ago (november 2003).</P>
<P>At first I only saved pictures of a few places around where I live
(including a beautiful webcam on the top of 
<a href="http://www.meteozoom.com/faces/EveryPlace.jsp?id=570">Monte Cimone</a> in the
Appennini, which I crawl every minute – 
<a href="http://www.meteozoom.com/faces/faces/EveryPlace.jsp">search for “cnr”</a> to see it).</P>
<P>Every
picture is online on the server’s local disks and the collection is
continuously increased.</P>

<h3>What was your goal, which features were most important to you?</h3>
<P><BR></P>

<P>My goal was to make a huge collection of webcam pictures available over
the net; this was quite exciting, because as far as I know nobody is
collecting this kind of data and, since past is past, nobody will
ever have the pictures that I own.</P>
<P>I wanted people to be able to check what the weather was like in a
place on the world in a particular moment of the past.</P>
<P>Ease of use was my first goal, even if I am not too good at writing user
interfaces. Then comes speed, because dealing with millions of
pictures on a home PC is not that efficient.</P>
<P>A parallel goal was of course to have everything working at the lowest
cost possible, so the whole “architecture” is on a couple of PCs
in my home, running all open-source software.</P>
<P>To tell the truth, the first strong push to my development of the web
interface came when Creator (version 1) came to life, because I
didn’t want to implement all of the request/response Java code on
my own (I know from my job experience that it takes a long time and is always error prone).</P>

<h3>Which tools (software, database, servers) did you choose, and why?</h3>
<P><BR></P>

<P>The web server machine is a single
	Pentium 3 with 1.3Gb of RAM and 4 hard disks (which are almost 900GB
	of space in total). It runs Linux Fedora Core 6, with Apache 
        Tomcat 5.5 as application server and Awstats for web statistics</P>
<P>The database server is a single AMD Athlon XP+ with 1Gb of RAM. It runs Linux
	Fedora Core 6 and MySQL	5.1 
	</P>
<P>The pictures crawling machine (the PC which explores and saves the webcam
pictures) is a single Pentium 2 with 192Mb of RAM, and DSL Linux. The
	crawling application is a multithreaded real-time Java application</P>
<P>Internet connectivity is guaranteed by my home DSL connection, which only has
a 384kbs upload speed (this is the main reason for the site's slowness). 
</P>
<P>As you can see the “production” environment is very old and quite
slow, but I can guarantee that from the local network it’s much
faster than from the internet, so the DSL connection is the main
bottleneck. That's why I plan to upgrade to an upload speed of 1Mbs very soon.</P>
<P>The development machine is my laptop, running Windows Server 2003 and
MySQL (among other things).</P>
<P>My development tool is <a href="https://netbeans.org/features/web/web-app.html">NetBeans 
IDE 5.5 with Visual Web Pack</a>; among other
libraries I use Hibernate, many of the Jakarta Commons libraries,
Log4j.</P>
<P>I upgraded to IDE from Creator in September 2006 (I think), while
the first versions were written with Creator 1 and then Creator 2.</P>

<h3>Was it difficult to migrate from Creator to NetBeans IDE?</h3>
<P><BR></P>

<P>Well ... it was not very straightforward. 
At first I tried to simply update my project using the 
<a href="https://netbeans.org/kb/55/vwp-migration.html">upgrade procedure</a>
described on the site. This seemed to work, but then I started having
problems using the visual editor and other issues here and there.</P>
<P>After some time I decided then to create a VWP project from scratch and
copy the single pages/JSPs into it by hand. 
Since then, everything is working great.</P>

<h3>What challenges did you encounter while working?</h3>
<P><BR></P>

<img src="../../../images_www/articles/interviews/mauro1.jpg" border="1" align="right">
<P>The main challenge is speed, second is speed, and then speed again.</P>
<P>I handle more than 9 million records in a single MySQL table, and I do
database searches using a low-end PC, so optimizing for speed is
quite challenging. 
Currently I am working on a mechanism of searching pictures at regular
intervals of time, which makes the queries even slower (due to a
limitation in MySQL's store procedure and in Hibernate's handling of
them).</P>
<P>Another thing I try to have in mind is simplicity on the interface side. At
first I used to have a single page with all of the search parameters
in it, but it was very confusing so I tried to separate simple
searches from expert ones.</P>
<P>Another issue is protecting my pictures from easy stealing from the outside...</P>
<P>On the technological site, I have to mention some difficulties I found
in understanding some strange life cycle of JSF elements (which I
don’t understand completely yet).</P>

<h3>How did you solve these difficulties?</h3>
<P><BR></P>

<P>On the speed side, I use the fastest MySQL engine which does a great
work I must say. Hibernate caching also gives a hand in speeding up
things.</P>
<P>For protection of my precious pictures, I use encryption on the URLs
(which should make it impossible to infer a new picture URL from its
place/date) and I copy a picture to a temporary area before allowing
the user to download it.</P>
<P>For the user interface, I separate beginner’s functionality from advanced
one, I tried to put help hints where possible, and use AJAX to make
the interaction smoother.</P>
<P>The small availability of components in the first version of Creator was
solved by... waiting for the release of new ones, which in fact happened
soon after.</P>
<P>Google Maps integration is done not by using the Netbeans-provided
component, but by generating Javascript code dynamically “by hand”.</P>
<P>I had many minor problems to solve while developing, but I must say
that the developer community on the SUN developer site helped me most
of the times (and I helped others in some cases)</P>
<P>To solve the Javascript issue I had to use an inelegant workaround that
includes hidden fields, bean properties and use of Javascript’s
<code>eval()</code> function.</P>

<div align="center"><p><img src="../../../images_www/articles/meteozoom/meteozoom-google-map.png" border="1" /></p></div>

<h3>What would you like to see improved in the IDE to make your work easier?</h3>
<P><BR></P>

<UL>
        <LI><p>Include more powerful AJAX components.<p>
        <p>The poorness of the very first version of Creator (mainly on the web
            components) didn’t help much, while now I honestly have to
            mention that the AJAX components that you can integrate in the IDE
        could be more complete.</P>
        <P>For example, the Google Maps component doesn’t allow doing many of the
            things one may need, and so does the AJAX text component (which I use
        anyway).</P>
        <LI><P>Better
            explanation of some advanced mechanism, like the “immediate”
            attribute of visual components, the difference between <code>prerender()</code>
            and <code>preprocess()</code> methods, the use of validators and converters
        (which I still don’t know how to use...)</P>
        <LI><P>Include
            some facilities to deal with client-side Javascript (for example,
        it’s not easy to dynamically create client side Javascript code)</P>
    </UL>
    
    <h3>How did you implement the Italian / English localization?</h3>
    <P><BR></P>
    
    <P>By using the Java locale mechanism and the Netbeans’ localization
    bundle editor.</P>
    <P>I did not use the NetBeans internationalization wizard because it seems
        not to work for JSPs, and most of my strings where declared in JSP
    files and not Java sources.</P>
    
    <h3>How long did it take to implement the current alpha version?</h3>
    <P><BR></P>
    
    <P>I do all the work in my spare time so it’s quite hard
        to tell... What
        I can say is that I am working on meteozoom.it (both the website and
        the backend crawling application, in proportion of 95%-5%) since late
    2004 I think.</P>
    <P>As I probably work on it for an average of 3-5 hours per week, maybe a
        good figure of the overall developing time was around 500 hours.
        This does not include the time I spent learning how to use Creator 1 
    (and then 2 and then VWP), which was completely new for me at that time.</P>
    
    <h3>What is the coolest event you have caught on webcam?</h3>
    <P><BR></P>
    
    <P>I don’t have much time to navigate all the pictures I have, but 
        <a href=" http://www.meteozoom.it/faces/SpecialEventsList.jsp">some
        things I caught</a> include a lunar eclipse seen from Italy, some very
        beautiful sunrises and sunsets, the arrival of a stage of the Giro
        d’Italia (the famous bicycle tour) on the top of Passo dello Stelvio
        last year, some climbers on the top of Mount Aconcagua in Chile
    waving hello to the camera.</P>
    <P>I would really like people to help me in finding interesting things
        caught by the webcams, as I would love 
        <a href="http://www.meteozoom.com/">help in finding new webcams</a> to
    crawl. (Click "post a webcam" at the top of the page.)</P>
    
    <h3>If you could start the portal over, what would you change?</h3>
    <P><BR></P>
    
    <P>I have to say that I have gone through a heavy restyling 6 months ago,
        which introduced Hibernate for database connections and applying a
        strong change to the user interface, so I wouldn’t change many
    things.</P>
    
    <P>I can summarize what I would like to do in the near future:</P>
    <UL>
        <LI><P>The
        ability to create movies on the fly from the pictures</P>
        <LI><P>Integrate
        some weather forecast service with my site</P>
        <LI><P>(This is a dream:) 
            A mechanism to automatically find webcams around the
            world without having to add them manually. I think this is almost
        impossible by now, I would need a standard for webcam hosting sites.</P>
    </UL>
    
    <h3>Do you have tips for NetBeans users who want to create a web portal?</h3>
    <P><BR></P>
    
    <UL>
        <LI><P>Try
            and write good Java code using the provided tools -- mainly
            refactoring facilities, beans creation tools for adding properties
        and fields.</P>
        <LI><P>Design
            the web interface using the VWP visual editor for 99% of the job,
            but then adjust the final settings on the generated JSPs directly
        -- for example for component styles.</P>
        <LI><P>Sometimes
            the editor doesn’t deal perfectly with JSP Expression Language, so
            try and edit it manually if you think something is not working as
        expected.</P>
        <LI><P>Study the 
            <a href="http://wiki.netbeans.org/wiki/view/NetBeansVWPUserFAQ#section-NetBeansVWPUserFAQ-ProcessingAndLifecycle">JSF 
            component lifecycle</a> as implemented in Netbeans; might be hard at
        first, but then it results to be very powerful.</P>
        <LI><P>If
            coming from plain ASP/JSP request/response programming model, try
            hard to think in terms of visual components, actions and events. You
            can really write web interfaces pretty much like you work with
        client interfaces and this is very very powerful.</P>
        <LI><P>Netbeans
            <a href="http://wiki.netbeans.org/wiki/view/VwpFAQDBUpdate">data provider</a> 
            mechanism is really great; I suggest not to use it for
            direct JDBC data access when dealing with large data sets.<BR>Instead,
            use the adapters to access data served by data-access frameworks,
            like Hibernate. This acts as a clear and very good separation
        between user interfaces and data layer.</P>
        <LI><P>Study
            and work together with other developers through the 
        <a href="https://netbeans.org/community/lists/">forums</a>, they’re great.</P>
        <LI><P>Make
            good use of init() and destroy() methods, they’re great for
            avoiding database connection leaks that I used to have. 
        </P>
        <LI><P>Download and learn the 
            <a href="https://netbeans.org/features/java/profiler.html">NetBeans Java Profiler</a>, it really helps in
        understanding where and why code is behaving badly.</P>
    </UL>
    
    <h3>Mauro, thanks for sharing your experience!</h3>
    
    <p>PS: 
    
    Mauro is currently working together with the <a href="&#109;&#97;&#x69;&#108;&#116;&#x6f;&#x3a;&#x72;&#x61;&#x76;&#101;&#x71;&#x61;&#x2d;&#x74;&#101;&#x73;&#116;&#x61;&#112;&#x70;&#115;&#64;&#x73;&#x75;&#x6e;&#46;&#x63;&#111;&#109;?subject=Migrating to NetBeans Visual Web Pack"
    >Visual Web pack team</a> to be one of the first to migrate his web application to NetBeans IDE 6.0.
    We plan to post a follow-up interview with Mauro 
    about the final version of his web portal. It will include more real-life 
    tips and tricks for web application developers, so check back here soon! </p>

    
    <h2>Related Links</h2>
    
<p>How's the weather? See for yourself at Mauro's web portal 
  <a href="http://www.meteozoom.com">meteozoom.com</a>. 
  New feature: Create a video from a row of pictures and watch the weather change.</p>

<h3>NetBeans 6.0 Web &amp; Java EE Development</h3>

    <ul>
        <li><a href="https://netbeans.org/kb/60/web/creator-migration.html">Tips for Migrating Java Studio Creator 2 Update 1 Projects to NetBeans IDE 6.0</a></li>
        <li><a href="https://netbeans.org/kb/60/web/vwp-migration.html">Tips for Migrating NetBeans Visual Web Pack Applications to NetBeans IDE 6.0</a></li>
        <li>Do you need further assistance with migrating from Sun Studio Creator to NetBeans Visual Web pack? 
        <a href="&#109;&#97;&#x69;&#108;&#116;&#x6f;&#x3a;&#x72;&#x61;&#x76;&#101;&#x71;&#x61;&#x2d;&#x74;&#101;&#x73;&#116;&#x61;&#112;&#x70;&#115;&#64;&#x73;&#x75;&#x6e;&#46;&#x63;&#111;&#109;?subject=Migrating to NetBeans Visual Web Pack"
        >Ask us!</a></li>
    </ul>

<h3>NetBeans 5.5 Visual Web Pack</h3>

<ul>
        <li>Are you looking for a free visual web application development tool? 
        <a href="https://netbeans.org/features/web/web-app.html">Download the Visual Web pack</a> 
        for NetBeans IDE.</li>
        <li>Do you have questions about visual web application development? Read the
        <a href="http://wiki.netbeans.org/wiki/view/NetBeansVWPUserFAQ">Visual Web pack FAQ</a>.</li>
        <li>Ready to create the web application of your dreams? Follow the 
        <a href="https://netbeans.org/kb/55/vwp-index.html">Visual Web Pack Learning Trail</a>.</li>
        <li>Share your experience and hear what others have to say about NetBeans Visual Web   
        development: Visit <a href="http://visualweb.netbeans.org/">NetBeans Visual Web Project</a>,
        sign in with your NetBeans username, and sign up for the 
        <a href="https://netbeans.org/projects/visualweb/lists">NetBeans Visual Web users</a> 
        mailing list.</li>
</ul>


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