Java saving strings - java

I have a RuneScape Private Server project coded in Java, and am trying to code a personal "tag" that players can use. I have managed to do this, but everytime there is a restart on the server, their "tag" gets reset to "null".
Their "tag" is initalized by doing a command ";;settag [name]". Their tag is then set to whatever they want. I have done this through a string:
if (command[0].equals("settag")) {
newTag = getCompleteString(command, 1);
newTag = player.yellTag
player.sendMessage("Your tag is now:" +newTag);
}
I am unsure what the most efficient way to fix this would be, I am thinking of just loading and saving through .xml/.txt files. By the way, player.yellTag is where the next command (::mytag) searches it from, which works fine, until there is a restart of the server.

it all depends on the context of your application. If you are planning on having less than a few hundreds players, then a xml file may be ok. You should look at JAXB, which is, afaict, the standard way to store your objects in Java. You can also store them as JSON files, using gson which is way simpler to use and implement than XML stuff.
But if you get to have more than thousands of players, you may want to get some more efficient way to serialize your tags by putting them in a database, and thus an ORM library like hibernate could help you do that.
You may want to make your own stuff, like a tag directory full of files named after unique ids of your players containing the players' tag... It's a lot more "hackish" but still quite efficient.

Related

How to dynamically load strings.xml easily?

I'm working on android i18n now. There are some strings.xml files in so many values-xxxx directories, but the product manager want to put these hole strings.xml files into the server, app get strings.xml File the rom network by a language-parameter dynamicly.But strings.xml is used in these ways: #string/xx, Widget.setText(R.string.xx), getString(R.string.xx), Toast.make(x, R.string.x, x) and so on... How to dynamic load android strings.xml easily? Or do you got a easier way to solve my problem? Thanks!
Frome one app I worked on:
After starting the app make an api call. The server responds with a JSON, containing all the strings. After parsing it, we can dynamically set all the strings in the right context or keep objects or even the json for getting the strings when required.
Hope this idea can help you.
i do understand that product manager wants to change this for a reason.
My Solution would be as follows:
Keep all string related to different language on server with different url pattern. In short url to get string should be like http://www.example.com/strings/{lang_param}/ example: http://www.example.com/strings/en/, http://www.example.com/strings/pt-br/ something like this.
Let server return JSON, where in key of strings would be same but the values changes based on url parameter i.e lang_param. Along with json server must return an identity has to indicate whether some strings items are changed or not. This identity hash must be kept in shared preference such that next time app boots-up you can query server check hash and if they are different mean some new changes are there get them in.
It is mandatory that you keep default strings.xml in internal memory of application using File file = new File(context.getFilesDir(), filename); given on https://developer.android.com/training/data-storage/files.html.
Once you get the new file update internal memory json file and create a utility method that parses this json. Please note that you need to maintain different hashes and json strings files based on different languages.

Which persistence method?

I'm building an application that downloads a set of images from a website, extracts some features from them and then allows a user to compare an image she submits to the downloaded set, to see which one is the closest. At the moment the application downloads the images and extracts the features from them. Then the image and the feature get wrapped in an object and stored in a map, with the key as the name of the image, and the value as the aforementioned wrapped object.
Because this is stored in memory, each time I start the application it has to go through the quite expensive process of downloading and feature extraction. It would be much quicker if it could just load this info from disk, but I'm not sure on the best way to go about it - I've thought about these options:
RDMS: something like Postgres or SQLite
NoSQL: something like
Voldemort or Reddis
Serialisation: use built in java methods to write
objects to a file (could also be used in conjunction with a DB
though...)
I want it to be really light weight; I want to keep the application as small as possible and keep configuration down to a minimum. For this reason serialisation seems like the way to go, but I'd like a second (or more) opinion on that, because something about doing it that way just feels wrong. I can't quite put my finger on why I feel like that...
I should also say that users can add images to the set when the application is running, I'd like to save these images too.
I wouldn't recommend serialzation - just too many pitfalls.
If what you have is really just a map, then i think any of the key-value stores ( like redis) would be appropriate.
If you have more complex data, then you might want to consider a database (whether SQL or no-sql).

Android Intents and Lists

I plan on reading several files when my app/game is created and using the information from them for the entirety of the app. I also have to write to the file at one point.
I have two files. One is a 2-column text file that I'll turn into a dictionary for fast searching. The other is a text file that has 11 columns. I'll make a dictionary out of two of the columns, and the other data I need kept as is so I can write to the columns to count the amount of times something happens in different circumstances for datamining.
Currently, I've turned the second file into a list of a list of strings, or List>. I can't figure out how to pass that around in intents. ".putStringArrayListExtra" only works for a list of strings.
Am I going about this the wrong way entirely? This is my first real Android app.
In order to store a data structure into an Intent, it has to be either serializable or parcelable. If your data structure is neither of them, you might create a class that would implement Serializable and manage it. A good example might be found here.
Once done, you then might use Intent.putSerializable(...) to store your data structure. See this:
Using putSerializable in Android
Additionally to this, if you could convert your structure into a JSON structure, you'd already have it done since it would be treated as a String. If not, the above solution should be easy to do.

How to avoid hardcoding file-references?

My Code:
I'm currently developing a game and throughout several different parts of the code I'm using some resources (Images/Sounds/Animations etc.). To avoid loading the same resource twice I wrote a ResourceManager, that returns the wanted resource if I pass a string to it.
Here's an example:
Image myImage = imageManager.getImage("princess");
This way I can reference a resource without knowing the name of the file or position of it, when I want to use it.
The trick here is that I have to load the images before I can get them like so:
imageManager.loadImage("res/princessImage.png", "princess");
This creates the ImageObject from the given file, and stores it into a HashMap with the given key.
My Problem:
I really don't want to hardcode the paths to these resources, because I'd have to change the sourcecode every time I decide to move or rename any of the resource-files.
A possible solution (?):
I thought about creating another HashMap that reads some kind of configFile and maps the in-code-resource-names to the resource-paths in a HashMap. The file would look somewhat like this:
princess: res/princess.png
hero: res/hero.png
sword: res/items/sword.png
This way I could use resource-names like "princess", "hero" or "sword" safely and don't worry about their position on the hard drive while I'm coding. Whenever I move or rename a resource-file I just update the path/name in this configFile and everything would be fine.
On the other hand I think it's pretty ugly to have one giant file that maps every in-code-resource-name to a path. This could result in one giant String to String HashMap which I'd have to store in the ResourceManager aswell. Things could get pretty confusing/unclear.
Does anyone have a better solution for me?
I'd really appreciate your help,
Thanks :)
Using a config or resource file as you described is a fine approach. Instead of populating a HashMap, though, consider using ResourceBundle or PropertyResourceBundle. It is designed to hold/access such things. http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/util/ResourceBundle.html

implement Bookmark list in java

I am developing a program which has three JTextBox which my users can enter and check some text for right rule.
So I want add a ablitiy to my program that my users can add or remove their favorite text to a Favorite List and can create folder in Favorite list and put some text in it, such as Bookmark library in FireFox or other web browser.
I want use RandomAccessFile to save favorite list as a favorite source.
How do I implemet it? is there beter way to implement it? is there beter way from RandomAccessFile?
Can any one help me?
Thanks.
There could be lots of approaches. It all depends on what you want to achieve.
Consider using Java serialization mechanism. You can serialize a collection of bookmarks to a file. When your app starts, you deserialize it, and get the same collection data.
The advantages are: simple and easy implementation. The disadvantages: you can't look through stored bookmarks in a text editor or something. The same class hierarchy is to be used to load the serialized version.
XML is human-readable and provides easy interoperability. Other applications would be able to handle your list of bookmarks.
It usually takes more resources to parse the XML and load it to memory and then to create the internal object structures. Though you can use the DOM to traverse the tree all the time, it could be not as convenient as the internal data structure using specialized classes.
Random Access Files work best with fixed record sizes. It means all the fields of your bookmarks must be fixed-length. For example, the name of a bookmark is String. When you write it out to a file, you store it like an array of a fixed length, let's say 20. This automatically implies that if users give a bookmark the name which length is greater than 20, the remaining characters would be lost.
It is also easy to implement with the caveats above. Of course the records could be of variable length, but then you lose the random access to file because you cannot easily calculate the position of a specific record.
Firefox uses JSON for storing bookmarks and allows exporting to HTML. You can explore this too.
You can also store bookmarks, and things you want to keep between sessions in the Preferences,
see http://download.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/util/prefs/Preferences.html

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