What is Ferris jMirror

Launch the application via Java Web Start

JMirror started as a coding exercise I would give to undergraduate computer science students as a way to get them familiar with programming in the Java language. The idea being the goal of the application is simple enough to understand yet coding it in Java is complex enough to get the familiar with Java programming.

Suppose you have 2 directories on your file system. The goal is to make the target directory exactly the same as the source directory. So if a file or directory exists in source but not in target it needs to be copied to target. If a file or directory exists in target which does not exist in source then it needs to be deleted from target. Additionally, the program needs to be smart enough to copy only those files which have changed instead of copying all the files all the time. The reason for this is simple. Suppose our source directory has 1000 data files each 500MB in size. That is a lot to copy! The first time running this program will take a long time as all the data files are copied. The second time will only take a millisecond since nothing has changed.

Tutorial

Download the binary distribution

Try double-clicking on the ferris-jmirror-0.0.2.jar file. If it does not automatically start the application, start it manually using the following command:

java -jar ferris-jmirror-0.0.2.jar		  
		  

Once started, it will look something like this:

Screenshot