Using the Zero Zone application

The Zero Zone is a Project Zero application that combines Project Zero services and widgets to offer a place for collaboration and networking; it demonstrates many of the features and possibilities of the Zero platform while also providing reusable components for your own Zero projects. From a feature set perspective, it is similar in concept to sites like facebook.com or myspace.com.

Installing and running the application

1. If you are using Apache Derby Network Server or MySQL as your database, you need to create a database named zile and start the database server. MySQL users also need to update the /config/ivy.xml file to include MySQL's JDBC drivers in the dependency list; if you open this file you will see that the dependency is already there, it's just commented out.

1. Start the zile.community application:

- From Eclipse, select Run As > Project Zero Application.

- From the CLI, type 'zero run'.

1. To connect to your page from anywhere other than localhost, modify the following stanza in zile.community/config/zero.config to include your hostname/IP address instead of localhost:

[/app/zile] serviceHost="http://localhost:${portNum}/resources"

1. Go to http://localhost:8080/setup. Enter the database name ('zile') and select the database product you are using. If you are using Apache Derby Network Server or MySQL and have set a user name and password, be sure to provide those in the given fields.

1. Click 'Create Tables' and then 'Add Sample Data'.

1. Restart the zile.community application.

1. Go to http://localhost:8080. You can use one of the guest accounts to login or create your own account by following the 'Sign up now' link.

To run the Zero Zone application, download the Zero samples plug-in and open the zile.community project - inside you will find a file named readme.txt that provides instructions for configuring the application.

Components

Profile service

Profiles are the central elements of collaboration. They represent the identifiable individuals in the community with attributes that are conducive to social networking such as credentials, areas of expertise, organization, professional publications (such as blogs and articles), and group affiliations.

Group service

Groups allow users to organize in a public forum in order to pursue a shared interest or goal. Each group has an owner, but the group is really defined by the list of members it has, each of whom can contribute to resources (blogs, etc.) owned by the group.

Blogging service

Blogging is one of the key features of community; it enables users to collaborate with self-publishing, and cross referencing to enrich personal profile and improving each users online presence. The Project Zero blog component can be integrated with the Zero commenting and tagging services for a richer blog interface.

Tagging service

The tagging component provides both user interface and back end implementation to support tagging capability. The service and user interface provide a RESTful tagging service that rich Internet applications (RIAs) can use as well as a reusable Tagcloud widget that utilizes this service.

Rating service

This component provides both the user interface and back end implementation to provide your users with the ability to rate arbitrary things or items. The rating services enables users to rate, on a scale from 1 to 5, anything identifiable with a unique string.

Commenting service

This component provides both user interface and back end implementation to support the creation of comments on arbitrary things or items. The comment widget enables users to post a comment on an anything identifiable with a unique string.

File sharing service

Using the file upload pattern, this component provides user interface and storage to upload and share files with other members. The file sharing service uploads files to a personal share directory and provides read access to one or more users.