PAD : Java Glossary

Introduction

PAD 3.11

In the previous PAD 3.11 spec, you typically created your pad files using desktop utility call PADGen.exe and tweaked them with a ordinary editor, or with custom programs. You then submitted them to various PADSites. You could do this manually, or with the assist of utility like the Mini Pad Submitter or submission services.

The format allowed for nonstandard extensions. For example, PADTube and PADMaps allowed you to submit just one of your PADs (Portable Application Descriptions) to a PADsite and it would automatically submit your whole stable. RoboSoft provided information to help the RoboSoft automated submitter. NewsFeed gave information about your RSS feeds.

PAD 4.0 Sample

PAD 4.0 Fields

The fields have changed slightly since 3.11. The PADTube and PADMaps extensions are gone. PAD signing is gone, replaced by certification and hosting verified PADs at ASP (Association of Shareware Professionals). https: links are now acceptable. The main difference is the way you create your PADs, (using the ASP web editor). You no longer post you PADs or submit them to PADsites. ASP handles this for you for a fee.

Most of the fields are self explanatory:

<!-- PAD Program_Version for Canadian Tax Calculator -->4.4<!-- /PAD -->

Internationalisation

In the PAD, you can include translations of the descriptions in dozens of languages and prices in dozens of currencies. You could prepare translations with Google translate or hire a translation service. There are three problems with doing this:

1. You are not able to maintain the translations yourself even when you make minor changes.
2. When your non-English speaking users download your program, they will discover the documentation is available only in English. You pulled a bait and switch on them.
3. If your users have questions, you will not be able to understand them.

PAD Tips

• Program_Name. ASP staff want your program to have a multi-word name. They don’t like generic names. e.g. Don’t call your word processor A Word Processor, call it The Pink Turtle Word Processor. Further they want that name precisely to appear on your order page.
• If when you import your PADs to AppVisor, nothing happens, no error message, examine your pad for stray control characters particularly 0x1a which Windows COPY inserts on conatenation.
• You must pass the online verifier before you can submit your PAD. You are still not out of the woods after you pass verification. ASP staff must still approve it using unpublished criteria. They will send you an email either accepting or rejecting your submission. They are the final authority.
• The process of converting from the 3.11 to the 4.0 scheme is incredibly labour intensive and not amenable to automation. It will probably be years before I have my 124 PADs converted and approved.
• There is no clear place to describe prices for multiple purchases, site licenses, source licences etc. or even to mention such things exist. I suppose you could tuck that away in the long description. To make things much worse, you muust useu the painfully slow online AppVisor editor.
• Some PADSites will reject your PADs if they have leading or trailing blanks on any fields.
• The original PADs were invented in the days of DOS (Disk Operating System) , when they were called DIZ (Description In Zip) files. That is why they sometimes use 8.3 filenames. The latest spec calls for long filenames.
• AppVisor now supposed to automatically remove deprecated fields such as:
  • Program_Specific_Category
  • PADmap
  • PADRING
  • PADTUBE
  • Filename_Generic
  • Filename_Long
  • Filename_Previous
  • Filename_Versioned
• When you change the version number there are five places you must update it on both the Program Info and Web Info sections: Primary_Download_URL, Secondary_Download_URL, Additional_Download_URL_1 and Additional_Download_URL_2
• Some of the old extensions have been made official and there some new ones. The extensions you want to preserve include:
  • <RoboSoft>
  • <Press Release>
  • <Affiliates>
  • <NewsFeed>
  • <Site>
  • <DynamicPad>
• Happily, if you change the company or contact information in any PAD it will propagate to all the others, just as it did in PADGen.

Certification

The ASP annual certification fee is . It is free for the ASP members and customers who order the Pro/Ultimate promotional package. The fee covers all the changes you make to your PAD during the year. This is the cost per pad file. If you have 3+ pad files you are better off to sign up for the annual ASP membership. They accept payment through PayPro Global Inc. which take credit/debit cards and Paypal. PayPal It is odd to charge per PAD since the verification work needs be done only once.

Do you have to submit an application’s PAD file to the download sites? Shouldn’t the download sites pick it up automatically once you publish it in the PAD Repository? They are allowed to. But, it doesn’t mean that they have to. You can pay to have ASP send it to them. I checked with ASP and discovered that you are permitted to submit them yourself, but you could muck up the master distribution if you are not careful. Basically you have to make sure you master PAD is on the AppVisor site and your PAD points there.

Certified PADs have a few extra fields like this:

The certificate document referred to says nothing but the company and author. There is no trace of a digital signature. There is no attestation of being virus or malware free. There is no attestation of any kind other than the pad is certified, leaving certified stubbornly undefined. I have asked ASP twice what it attests to. They have not replied. I gather all they are certifying is that they checked that the PAD was indeed composed by the company and author claimed (which is roughly all code signing certifies).

Signing pads yourself with your own code-signing certificate has been discontinued. If all PADs are downloaded directly from ASP , there is no opportunity for them to be tampered with. The advantage of the new scheme is it does not require small authors to buy an expensive code-signing certificate each year.

You don’t apply for certification until after your PAD has been approved for publication.

Redirecting From Your Old 3.11 PAD To Your New 4.0 PAD

After ASP accepts and posts your PAD, it will reside at an URL something like this:
http://repository.appvisor.com/info/app-85008da94eb0/PowCost_pad.xml.
Your new 4.0 pad has this URL automatically embedded in it as the <Application_XML_File_URL> field. You are not supposed to replace the 3.11 PAD posted on your own website with this new 4.0 pad. It is impossible to set up the redirect to the new pad in the usual way with:
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="10; URL=http://repository.appvisor.com/info/app-85008da94eb0/PowCost_pad.xml">
because the PAD 3.11 file is a *.xml and only *.ext files can have <meta headers. If you have control of the configuration of your HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) server, or if you ISP (Internet Service Provider) is unusually friendly, you can arrange the redirects in the configuration tables of your web server. I have asked ASP to consider three alternatives:

• Posting an modified PAD 3.11 with the new URL in the <Application_XML_File_URL> field on your own website in the usual place under the usual name.
• Posting the new PAD 4.0 file in the old PAD 3.11 spot with the old PAD 3.11 name with the new URL embedded.
• Replacing your old 3.11 PAD with a tiny XML PAD Moved file giving the new URL at the AppVisor site.

Another possibility is to compose a complete list of redirects in the format your HTTP server likes them and email them from time to time to your ISP to include to reduce his work to a minimum. See HTTP redirects for what that list would look like if you use an Apache server.

ASP has not yet got back to me on what they want us to do. So I put new PAD 4.0 files where the PAD 3.11 files used to be, and composed a set of Apache HTTP Redirects and sent them off to my ISP. He has not responded either. I adjusted my ANT (A Neat Tool) build system to track whether each project is using 3.11 or 4.00 PADs and do some consistency checks.

The Chicken and Egg Problem

In the olden days of PAD 3.11, you would simultaneously publish your updated PAD and your updated distributables on the net. Today you must post your updated distributables first. Then go to the AppVisor website and manually update your PAD and then publish it. A few days later an ASP employee will OK the changes and post the new PAD on the AppVisor website.

In the meantime, PADsites (and possibly even AppVisor itself) will complain that your distributable cannot be found, has the wrong name, the wrong size, the version does not match etc. and may delist you. This makes the case for not building a version number into you distributable names. If the name never changes, it can’t very well get out of sync. Howvever, removing version numbers from distibutables is more confusing for your users since they can’t tell by looking at a distributable what version it is. It also makes it more likely you will accidentally post the wrong version.

You cannot do it in the other order or the AppVisor validation process will balk.

Rant

ASP has done a number of stupid things with PADs . PADsites are rapidly disappearing. What did they do wrong?

• ASP insists you use a web-based tool to prepare your PADs . It is slow and cumbersome. They used to offer PADGen, a relatively quick GUI (Graphic User Interface) utility.
• They did not update PADGen to the new format.
• You have to start from scratch for each product. If you have a large number of products like I do it would take months just to update the pads to the new format. All my tools for bulk updating PADs no longer apply.
• ASP maintains the master library of all PADs . They decide what gets to be listed. PADsites have no advantage over the ASP site. They all have access to the exact same library. They don’t scrounge or solicit their own pads. PADsites are all rapidly going out of business.
• It was a high-handed power grab that sounded good on paper. The PADs do not belong to ASP, just the format.
• After you make your changes on the Appvisor website, they are not approved and published for months. Submitter is typically three versions behind. This means customers will be directed to download URLs way out date. To help bypass this problem, you must not encode the version in the download name. Customers can’t tell which version a download is without installing it.

False Advertising

ASP is offering Rudenko’s software claiming to submit to 1000 sites. This is untrue. There are fewer than 200 sites that welcome automated submissions. I know because I wrote the mini PAD Submitter. Most put up roadblocks such as Captchas. Even the official ASP list is mostly deadwood. I challenged ASP on this point and they said their software also submits to sites that do not accept PADS. They reformat the data in the site’s proprietary format. That is how they get the number so high. I used the Rudenko submitter and discovered most of the sites it submitted to were dead. He is deliberately keeping deadwood on his lists to pad the count.

Futures

The list of program categories needs to be expanded, perhaps with a third layer of detail. The problem now is the categories are not fine enough for a significant number of PADSites. Those PADSites resort to proprietary categories that you enter on a web form rather than conveniently embedding in the PAD file. This defeats the entire point of the PAD file as a self-contained complete, universal descriptor and interferes with efficient automated submission. We will see how the new <Program_Categories> field works out. You can make up your own categories and ASP may include them in their official set. You can also email them sets of new categories.

X.25

PAD (Packet Assembler/Disassembler) has another completely different meaning. One of its jobs is to reassemble arriving packets in the proper order. It is a small computer owned by the local packet net company (Datapac in Canada). You can access it using your modem with a local phone call. The PAD will then route your call via digital satellite, fibre optic and microwave links almost anywhere on earth. Though static on the line between your computer and the PAD can cause errors, once it reaches the PAD , special error detection and correction methods guarantee your data gets to its final destination with no further errors added. This method is much cheaper than phoning long distance. Packet nets use long distance circuits about 250 times more efficiently than 2400 BPS (Bits Per Second) modems phoning direct. Many modems cannot call directly more than a few hundred miles because of the static and other distortions. Any modem using the packet nets can easily reach the four corners of the earth. Now, the pioneering packet nets are made obsolete by the Internet.