In summer 2004 I graduated at the Technical University in Dresden, Germany. My diploma thesis is about the development of a plugin architecture for serving content from a Jukebox (containing possibly hundreds of DVDs, DVD-RAMs or CDs) to the web. Various protocols, including streaming protocols, should be possible to integrate into the server as plugins. As a demonstration of the architecture I had to implement a plugin for WebDAV.

Technologies used in the prototype implementation are: Java, Tomcat, Struts, the Spring Framework, Jakarta Lucene for full text search and PostgreSQL. Most of the WebDAV code is inspired by Jakarta Slide’s nice WebDAV implementation, although I had to reimplement big parts to fit my architecture. Since it’s only a prototype, I don’t support all the extensions to WebDAV, like versioning or searching, but adding these capabilities should be no problem.

Accessing the Jukebox was easy, since there is a low level driver software which maps the whole jukebox to a drive letter on a Windows box. So my server can be used without a jukebox, i.e. just accessing files on a local disk. In fact this is what I did most of the time during development - Debian doesn’t have drive letters ;-)

You can get the full (german) text here (PDF). JavaDocs are online, drop me a line if you’re interested in the project.

LaTeX is great

I used LaTeX for writing my thesis, and that was a lot of fun :) Not only I learned a lot about LaTeX, using make to build your diploma thesis PDF document simply rocks. Despite the fact that LaTeX runs on lots of platforms, there’s simply no easier way to get a consistent, good looking document.

But the really strong point of LaTeX is: it simply gets out of your way while you’re writing.

Just fire up an editor and type away. No toolbars, no assistents and no dialog windows - just think and write.