Neils VGetty Servlet

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Latest News (v.1.0.5)

  1. Updated to a completely alternative look and feel.
  2. Fixed a couple of bugs.
The ease by which I could update the interface to something very different than what it was is a testament to the decoupling of view and model/controller that both Velocity and Turbine provide. Great stuff if you ask me. Took me about 5 hours, including re-aquainting myself with the TDK and making the necessary changes (and fidling lots with the HTML).

What is is then?

This servlet allows you to listen to answerphone messages (which are recorded through something like vgetty). It provides the following features:

  1. View waiting voice messages (date, has been heard?, length of message).
  2. Delete voice messages.
  3. Email zero or more people when new voice messages are recorded.
  4. Maintenance:
    1. Maintain the available greetings (add, remove).
    2. Install new greetings from WAV files, either from disk or from HTTP URL.
    3. Maintain misc. settings (paths to conversion utilities etc).
    4. Maintain the list of people who are to be notified by email.
Note: Currently, in order to be able to hear messages through your browser (i.e: Netscape) you require some other plugin. I personally use RealPlayer. Seems to work fine for me. Other browsers seem to have various other ways to play .WAV files, so, as always Jim, Y.M.M.V.

Why?

I began by wanting to do a "useful" project with Servlets, to further my understanding of them. I already had a Perl script that ran my answerphone at home (using mgetty+sendfax+vgetty), and thought ... why not re-write that? I also wanted a 'real' project to which I could apply my 'Velocity and Turbine' experiment to.

And why not? I've got a number of machines at home (yes, sad, I know) and it's somewhat useful to be able to use any of them without first having to install software in order to do so... ra ra ra. <Typical sales pitch for web based interface goes here> ... I might even install a 15inch LCD X based unit near the phone :-)

I started by creating a basic Servlet/JSP application. Although I already knew how to do this, I wanted to have something to "convert" from, so that I could see the changes that occured when migrating to Velocity and Turbine.

This project is the result of about 2 weeks work (while I was looking for work), on and off. I guess I did about 6 hours per day on it. This time includes learning 'the way of Turbine' and to a far lesser extend, Velocity.

Getting Your Mits on It (aka Download)

Currently, the source code and a few packages are available from sourceforge.

Installation

I've chosen to distribute the servlet in the standard WAR file format. As such, you should not have any problem installing it, provided that you both have a relatively up to date container. All required JAR's are included in the WAR file.

To install (based primarily on a apache/resin combination):

  1. Copy the .WAR file to the servlet 'deploy location' (that's servlet dependent. On resin, it is /webapps)
  2. At this point the servlet is deployed, and should work. However; before you get carried away and try to use it:
  3. Create a directory within the servlet directory (which should be automatically created by the container) called 'messages'. This would normally be created by the servlet, however you need to set the permissions of a file in this directory if you want to be able to head Greetings files via the servlet properly.
  4. Create a file in the 'messages' directory named 'tmpWavFile.wav'. To do this, you might do 'touch messages/tmpWvaFile.wav'.
  5. Change the ownership and/or permissions of that file such that your web server is able to read it. On my system, I use a mixture of apache/resin, therfore I did: 'chown apache.apache messages/tmpWavFile.wav' && chmod u+r messages/tmpWavFile.wav'
  6. Setup your web server <-> servlet stuff if not already done. For example: I use apache for serving everything other than the servlets. Apache is setup to simply pass servlet requests to srun (which is the resin servlet runner). However; apache does handle the requests for messages in .wav format.
If you are wanting to install the servlet where you have a) a firewall [with a modem], b) an application server [where you are running vgetty-servlet], then see these instructions.

Building the servlet

This step is optional. I've included a .war file in the distribution. However if you want to build the servlet, this should not pose a significant problem - however I've no idea what kind of environment you have (and the current build.xml is somewhat tailored to my environment). My environment consisted of:

You will probably see this reflected in the build.xml file. Of course, you will need to change the properties [at the top of build.xml] before you will be able to get the build to work.

Dependencies

Here are a list of dependencies that I know of (packages required other than those that are in the distribution). You will need to have the packages listed here installed. If you don't ... then it won't work, will it?
  1. mgetty+sendfax, and the voice extensions (vgetty). My server is an old Mandrake 7.2 box - hence it runs version 1.1.22-2mdk RPM's. Obviously your's may be different. Whatever mgetty+sendfax distro you have must also include the following tools: rmdtopvf, pvftormd, wavtopvf, pvftowav.
  2. Java V 1.3.0 (or above) - I make use of some objects in the javax.sound.sampled package.

Possible Cotchas

  1. The voice.conf file is only looked for in /etc/mgetty+sendfax/ thus far. If there are alternate locations for this file, please let me know and I will add them to the code. In the meantime, you can just put a symlink in there which will get around this for the present.
  2. On my system at least, you need to be root in order to read the voice.conf file. My servlet container runs as root (which may be a bad idea), so I'm OK. Y.M.M.V.
This should get the servlet itself working. You should now be able to access it via

http://my.servername/vgetty/Main

Making the link from vgetty to the servlet

Obviously, in order to be able to listen to answerphone messages, they must make their way from vgetty, to a directory managed by this servlet. You can do this via the script:

bin/convertIncommingMessage

Setup instructions:
  1. Modify the script above. You MUST MODIFY THIS SCRIPT FOR YOUR ENVIRONMENT, otherwise no messages will ever appear! The script contains a couple of environment variables that need to be modified. Nothing hard really.
  2. Next, Modify your voice.conf file. Find the line "message_program" and change it to point to this script. Example: message_program /usr/local/resin/webapps/vgetty/bin/convertIncommingMessage (on one line)

Testing

  1. Testing was performed on a box running the Blackdown 1.3.0-FCS VM.
  2. Deployment of WAR into Resin 1.2. No problems at all. Just dropped it into webapps/ and it worked.
  3. Deployment of WAR into Resin 2.0. As above, worked right off the bat.
  4. Deployment of WAR into Turbine TDK v2.1. No probs.
I've not performed any testing under Windows. I don't even know if the mgetty+sendfax package is available on that platform or not. Please don't ask me if it is. I don't know, and I don't really want to either :-). I'm not a "I hate Windows" nutter - just I prefer linux, and have other things to do with my time than find that kind of thing out.

Contact Details

You can reach me via email at neil@cloudnine.net.nz. Feel free to submit commants and/or bug reports (please include some relevant information, such as the servlet container being used, the version of vgetty, and things like that) - can't promise I'll do anything with them. Better yet - get in there and fix it yourself! It's really not that hard. I've even commented the code.
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