Argotic on the Web: Part 1 (Solution Design)
Recently I got excited about a the video about Argotic (blog) on dnrTV.
Argotic is a .NET library for RSS/ATOM/OPML creation and consumption. The library is very easy to use, and can be used in a shared hosting environment (creation) and desktop environment(consumption).
So I decided to make amends for all the tutorials I've read and never contributed to - by coding up an example application for Brian's Argotic .NET Library for .NET.
This is a complete tutorial, beginning to end, feeder to aggregator. Get a glass of water and get comfortable. I'll be posting this in multiple parts and updating things as necessary.
Introduction
This solution will be divided into 3 Parts.
Part 1: Solution Design
Part 2: Setup
Part 3: Implementation
Architecture
Goal: This will be a RESTful (whatever that means) website that allows users to publish text.
Platform: The site will be hosted on an ASP.NET GoDaddy shared server, and will use the shared server instance of SQL to store data (up to 200MB, more than enough).
Features and Interface: The site will be as simple as possible. It will have 5 pages: CreateAccount, DeleteAccount, Post, Delete, and View pages.
Data storage: User-posted data will be stored on local site files. Critical site information that needs to be accessed quickly (passwords) will be stored in the SQL server. (GoDaddy SQL servers can only store 200 MB, so we don't want to store too much user-posted data in the SQL database)
Solution Plan
We'll be creating 2 Visual Studio projects for this solution. (They'll actually be in 2 different solutions, since we're using Visual Studio Express for the development)
1. The RSS/ATOM/OPML Feeder
This will be the website.
2. Reader
We'll be creating a Windows Forms application that will contact the website (http://piqd.com/ArgoticWebSample/View.aspx?user=david&format=rss) and get the content for the given user.
The Web Pages
CreateAccount - Creates an account with a username and a password.
DeleteAccount - Deletes an existing account given a username and password.
Post - A logged-in user can publish a new post from this page.
Delete - A logged-in user can see all of his/her posts and choose to delete one of them at a time.
View - This page will return a feed (RSS, OPML, or ATOM) with the given user's posted data.
The Windows Form Reader
There will only be one Form if I can help it. We'll jump that when we get to it!
This is it for my first post. I'll be coming back to revise it I'm sure.
Continued at Argotic on the Web: Part 2 (Setup).