Evaluation Software Registration
EarthStones' Web class includes code which offers developers a painless way to create evaluation copies of software which, upon registration, grant the user a temporary license valid for a specified period of time and provides more protection than the ubiquitous "nag screen" typical of freeware products.
The idea for this scheme is lifted from Ipswitch whose popular program WS_FTP Professional is available in an evaluation version which checks in with their web server each time it runs to make sure that the 30-day evaluation period has not expired. I am also indebted to Matt Wright at Matt's Script Archive whose widely used and nicely documented Guest Book script taught me enough about CGI scripting in Perl to manage the server-side of the registration process described here.
Heres how it works:
The CGI scripts automatically determine the users IP (Internet) Address (e.g., 230.445.235.41) and use its first three octal values (i.e., 230.445.235) as the key in maintaining a registration database on the server. By default, only a single registration is required to run any program (applet or application) that makes use of the Web class. Optionally (see below), registration can be required for each program as well.
The following four variables customize features of the registration process. Note that these must be hard-coded into the Web.java source file and cannot be otherwise modified.
Parameter | Default Value | Comments |
checkReg | false | If set, software is an evaluation copy with a temporary license and a check will always be made at startup to insure its validity. |
regDays | 30 | The temporary license period. |
registerEach | false | If set, each program (i.e., applet or application) run with an evaluation copy copy of the software must be registered; otherwise, registering once permits any program to be run from the registered Internet Address for the duration of the temporary license period. |
demoReg | "Home/Tips/02/Text.htm" | The HTML document containing the software registration form. This path is assumed to be relative to that specified by the Site.webServer variable. |
Copies of the CGI scripts chckReg.cgi and demoReg.cgi along with the registration form (an HTML source document Text.htm) are included with the purchase of the JDoc or Jsite products and include detailed information about setting up the necessary files and file permissions. These files can be found in the html subdirectory of your software installation directory (i.e., by default in C:\Program Files\Earthstones\html.