Using Java build a distributed system

Introduction Information management and tracking becomes more difficult as the number of things to track increases. For most users, the number of web pages that they wish to keep track of is quite large and, if they had to remember to check everything manually, it's easy to forget a webpage or two when you're tired or busy. Enter syndication, a mechanism by which a website can publish summaries as a feed that you can sign up to, so that you can be notified when something new has happened and then, if it interests you, go and look at it. Initial efforts in the world of syndication included the development of the RSS family of protocols but these are, effectively, not standardised. The ATOM syndication protocol is a standards-based approach to try and provide a solid basis for syndication. You can see the ATOM RFC here (Links to an external site.) although you won't be implementing all of it! XML-based formats are easy to transport via Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP), the workhorse protocol of the Web, and it is increasingly common to work with a standard format for interchange between clients and servers, rather than develop a special protocol for one small group of clients and servers. Where, twenty years ago, we might have used byte-boundary defined patterns in transmitted data to communicate, it is far more common to use XML-based standards and existing HTTP mechanisms to shunt things around. This is socket-based communication between client and server and does not need to use the Java RMI mechanism to support it - as you would expect as you don't have to use an RMI client to access a web page! In this prac, you will take data and convert it into ATOM format and then send it to a server. The server will check it and then distribute a limited form of that data to every client who connects and asks for it. When you want to change the data in the server, you overwrite the existing file, which makes the update operation idempotent (you can do it as many times as you like and get the same result). The real test of your system will be that you can accept PUT and GET requests from other students on your server and your clients can talk to them. As always, don't share code.