Sunday, 6 January 2008
CardMeeting server is ready for purchase
Hello CardMeeting users,
The CardMeeting license file support is complete! Buy CardMeeting today, woohoo! ;)
From a professional standpoint, CardMeeting has been a very rewarding project to work on. I've gotten to leverage libraries that I only vaguely knew existed two years ago. For the CardMeeting server licensing, I knew I needed to digitally sign the license key files that are given out to licensees so as to prevent their tampering with them. (Don't want to encourage people to make up their own license keys and give themselves free entitlements, after all.)
So, on this last misadventure I employed the fantastic open source library from the Legion of the Bouncy Castle. Those goofballs know how to make one heck of a library, wow. Their digital signature routines work great! I can cook up a license file with any text or XML editor, run it through my custom "signed license" xml generator, and voila, I have a tamper proof license key.
On the server side, there is a "license" folder created that is now scanned every couple seconds for new files added. Once a license key file is issued to you by Woldrich, Inc., you can just drop the file in there and the server will automagically register the new entitlements! (No server reboot required!)
It's one thing to see that kind of license key thing done by software companies and figure you know all the in's and out's of digital signatures. It's quite another to actually DO it, write the tools, and build support throughout your application to actually enforce and respect the entitlements named in the license key.
You can see the new license key code in action when you login to a CardMeeting. It matches your request up with a license key and then checks to see if your server is entitled to have that many users logged in at once. If you have too many users logged in, it only complains, it won't kick you off.
The only exception to that rule is if no license key is found. If that is the case, then the server puts itself into "QA mode" and only allows up to 3 users total to connect to the server. I figured people would want to run QA servers for new builds I give them, so that was the motivation there.
The other big news is that I went through a refactoring and cleanup effort in order that the server software would be ready for distribution. A couple of subtle bugs were squashed in the process so hopefully I've enhanced your stability and made for a better CardMeeting experience.
Thanks for using CardMeeting,
Dave Woldrich
dave@woldrich.com
