Installation

To successfully install WebCounter on your server you need to complete three steps:

1. setting up the remote database
2. installing and launching the server-side application
3. including the client applet in your pages

The database

To function correctly, WebCounter requires you to set up a database where information about all the accesses will be stored.
This database will consist of three tables named "Accesses", "Hosts", "Pages" (no quote marks). Here are the columns for each table:

• Accesses
  "ID" (Integer, key), "Host" (Integer), "Page" (Integer), "Entered" (Date/Time), "Exited" (Date/Time)
• Hosts
  "ID" (Integer, key), "Name" (Text, 255 chars), "Address" (Text, 15 chars)
• Pages:
  "ID" (Integer, key), "URL" (Text, 255 chars)

The "Hosts" and "Accesses" tables will be initially empty, while you are required to build rows in the "Pages" table for each page on your site that contains the WebCounter applet.

The server-side application

First and foremost, it is recommended that you download and install an implementation of the JDK (Java Development Kit) or JRE (Java Runtime Environment) version 1.1 or greater. This application makes use of the JDBC API and of inner classes, both 1.1 features, and it might not work with JDK 1.0.2.
To specify the name and type of the database to use, as well as sensitive information like the login and password required to access said database, you need to create a parameters file. Its content will look like this:

The first field (URL) is a JDBC URL identifying your database; see Sun's JDBC documentation for more details. If possible, set up the permissions on this file in such way to disallow malicious users to access its content.
The WebServer application takes two optional command line arguments specifying the port used for communication with the client and the file name of the parameters file. For example, on a Unix system

java WebCounterServer.java /usr/local/lib/mywebcounter.defaults 1850 

tells the WebCounterServer application to read the database information from the file "mywebcounter.defaults" residing in the directory "/usr/local/lib" and start listening for clients on port 1850.
The default file name and port are "webcounter.defaults" (in the current directory) and 1967, respectively.

The applet client

Include the WebCounterApplet in each page for which you want to monitor usage.
You can specify some additional parameters:

• port
  The number of the communication port. This must be the same number specified when starting the WebCounterServer application. The default is 1967.
• imagebase
  The applet will use "imagebase0.gif", ..., "imagebase9.gif" for displaying the digits.
• background
  The applet background color. Useful if the digits are transparent GIF89 images.

A sample installation

To make life simpler for Windows users, here is a sample installation, using Microsoft Access 97 as database.
If you use a different database or OS and you have some problems/question about setting up WebCounter, feel free to contact me and I'll try to help (if I can).