How To Best Check For The Latest Libraries Upgrades

Nope, that's about it. Someone had made an app that would check automatically, but it had got pulled for certain reasons.

I understand Erel's desire to protect the libraries but being the wizard that he is, I would think that he could come up with some kind of feature built into B4A that could check for and install the libraries in a secure manner. But I suppose if it were that easy, he'd have done it by now.

It certainly would be a nice feature to have, and many programs these days do check for and install additional libraries and plugins.

All forum post attachments are saved in a (MySQL?) database - i'm sure that Erel said that in a post somewhere on the forum.

It'd be possible to query the database for all attachments and find which attachments contain valid library files (jar and xml).
The library name and version could be extracted so Erel knows exactly what libraries are currently stored in the database and what versions exist.

From there a better web interface could be built to enable us all to find the latest available versions and the necessary download links.

Biggest problem to achieve this though is the non-standardised way that libraries are packed when uploaded.
A library could be uploaded in a zip or rar archive.
Within that zip or rar archive the jar and xml files may be in a sub folder or even a sub folder of a subfolder.
Some people may have uploaded archives in another format - not zip or rar etc.

The possibilities are many but it's not an impossible take i think.

Martin.

We should unify it in a system not using the forum.

I would be willing to make it myself, as I have some experience with PHP

I would make a page where you upload a ZIP (and only a ZIP, not RAR) and assign it a version number.

We'd also have to unify the file structure.

Then I'd make a program in VB6 that
-queries the server using your login information to see that you're registered.
-queries the server for version numbers of installed plugins. And downloads/unzips the new version.

I would need FTP access, or some other way to upload files.
As well as access (the user/pass for reading) to the user registration database.
I think this board is PHPBB3-based, meaning I already know how to access the cookie data to see who is logged in.

It might be possible to create a custom vBulletin plugin...

https://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/writing_plugin_code

Martin.