5Star Implementation Plan

Background

5Star have a shareshare site at http://www.5star-shareware.com/ which has listings of shareware programs which users can search and browse to find progams they wish to download. There is a mechanism to count the number of downloads have occured for each piece of software (actually, the counter merely counts how many times the page has been loadecd which tells you where you can download the software from). The user can view which packages have been 'downloaded' most often using a program called "topdownload.cgi". This program now no longer works and there is no source code or documentation.

There is a working version of the script at http://www.5star.nsm.co.uk/topdownloads.cgi

Requirements

Re-write the topdownload script. It has two parts:

Stage 1

• It takes as input a set of files (one per package) which include information about how many times each package has been downloaded in total, and how many times in the previous day.
• Sort this data by number of downloads and save it to disk. Note that this re-indexing should be performed once a day (the first time the script is called on each day)
• Reset the daily download count.

Stage 2

• Take the file generated in stage 1 as input and list 10 packages in order of number of downloads in the previous day with a link to more details about each package. Each page have links to the nth (1<=n<=10) set of 10 hits (i.e. users only get to see the top 100 downloads).
• This first page will have the top 10 downloads on it.

Notes

Normally, this would be a very simple operation, but we must take care to ensure that the new version works in a way as close to the original as possible. In particular we must make sure that our scripts use the correct components of the current 5Star website since each of the scripts on the 5Star site interact.

Time

Stage 1 : 2 hrs
Stage 2 : 4 hrs (1hr for the script and 3 hours to customise it for 5Star's site).