CSC365 Assignment 1

Requirements

• The program first reads the user's .newsrc file to see which newsgroups are subscribed to.
• The then constructs a collection of all newsgroups received from the local news server.
• At the user's discretion, the program can display ALL received newsgroups, or just the ones subscribed to, or the ones subscribed to that have unread articles.
• The user can change subscription status if desired.
• When the user chooses one of the groups, the program displays the subject lines for all available articles in the group.
• When the user chooses one of the articles, the program displays it. The display need not be fancy -- for example you can just dump into a JTextArea.
• Upon exit, the program saves the modified .newsrc file.

The presentation details are up to you. The implementation restrictions are:

• Use java.util.collections for all data structures. Read through the Collections tutorial first.

• Use Swing components for the GUI. Read through the relevant parts of the Swing tutorial first.

• Some news utilities put additional information in .newsrc files. But you can ignore all lines that are not in the form group colon first-number-read hyphen last-number-read, as in:

  comp.lang.java.programmer: 1-2345
  

• Use standard NNTP protocols. See IETF NNTP RFC 977. Also skim through relevant parts of the Networking tutorial. As discussed in class, to experiment with NNTP, try telnet news.oswego.edu 119 and type, for example, LIST or HELP. Also, feel free to lift code from NNTPClient.java. As a quick guide, you can probably get by using only the requests LIST, GROUP, HEAD, BODY.

comp.lang.java.beans: 1-7737
comp.lang.java.machine: 1-7315
comp.programming.threads: 1-15339
comp.emacs.xemacs: 1-39197
comp.windows.x.kde: 1-7522

Test your program thoroughly before submitting, and arrange a demo within 48 hours of submitting.