PAD : Java Glossary

PAD Editors	Manual PAD Submission	PAD Submission Services
Verification	Important Sites	Mini PAD Submitter
PAD Creating Tips	Hassle Free Sites	Automated PAD Submitters
PAD file Format	Minor Hassle Sites	X.25
Futures	Selling Sites	Links
NewsFeed Extension	PAD Submitting Tips

PAD Editors

•  PADManager: free. More complex than PADGen. Published by the Submit-Everywhere/RoboSoft people who also brought you the Rudenko <NewsFeed> PAD extension. You edit by filling in fields in a collapsible tree. It is the most professional/serious PAD editor I have used. It supports a number of PAD extensions directly, but not PADmap or PADRING.
  The main drawback is it supports deprecated field values, such as NT 3.0 for Program_OS_Support, which will not pass ASP (Association of Shareware Professionals) verification.
•  PADGen: This is the program I use myself. Published by ASP, the creators of the PAD specification. For details, see the PADGen separate entry.
• PadCreator: Simple fill in the blanks. Lets you maintain many different companies. Has ability to submit your PADs (Portable Application Descriptions) with a click of a button to the commercial affiliate sites of your choice and also the shareware sites. There were minor problems with layout on my machine. Some windows were too big and partially obscured the row of tabs that control which section. It has extra fields for MS, Regnow, Trialware etc. And it is FREE!, however it is also adware with a top banner. It stores all the data that you key in proprietary format files. It generates XML and a summary HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) file on demand. The program drove me nuts for weeks because every time I generated an XML file it was empty, without any error message. I eventually figured out why. It quietly refuses to generate the XML until you have filled in all the fields. In other words you must pass verification before it will generate any XML for you to look at. It also freezes the ability to select a different program to edit. You must to a save-program to unfreeze it. To discard changes, you must exit the program. You must do all your edits with the program. Don’t edit the generated xml or htm files. When you create the PAD files, check the directory they are being created in. It forgets each time where you keep them.

  Every time you make a change, e.g. a new version, you must do five things to make the change take:

  1. Click Save Program.
  2. Click Create PAD .
  3. Copy the generated *.xml file to where it will be uploaded to your website.
  4. Upload the PAD XML to your website.
  5. Submit the PAD to various distribution websites. In theory, once you have submitted a PAD once to a website, it will poll your PAD from time to time to see if it has changed, so resubmitting is optional.
  There are no facilities to make bulk changes to many program descriptions at once. The closest I came to a clone ability was to create a PAD, copy it, modify the program name in the XML and import it back. When you edit a program name, it looks as if it did not take, but if you exit and restart, you will see that it did. PAD Creator stores its company master data in F:\Program Files\PAD Creator\data\company.dta using a fixed proprietary fixed length field format where fields are padded out with spaces to the maximum length. It stores its program information in F:\Program Files\PAD Creator\data\* and F:\Program Files\PAD Creator\pad\*. The program has not been updated since Last revised: 2004-07-19 Verified: 2007-05-03 and it is showing its age with 8.3 filenames and no mention of Vista.

PAD Verification

PAD Creating Tips

• *.xml PADs and *.pml PadGen files are XML. They should pass muster with an XML validator. This includes encoding awkward characters in the XML, not the HTML &eacute; way.
• The documentation on just what is expected in various fields is sketchy. Run the verifier and look around at what other authors are doing. I discovered for example that icons are *.png, *.jpg or *.gif files, not *.ico and must be precisely 32 × 32. Some PAD sites insist on *.gif, but I refuse to comply.
• About the only thing missing is a 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.
• 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.
• When you change the version number there are seven places you must update it on both the Program Info and Web Info sections: Filename_Versioned, Filename_Previous, Filename_Long, Primary_Download_URL, Secondary_Download_URL, Additional_Download_URL_1 and Additional_Download_URL_2

PAD file Format

The PAD file is on ordinary XML file with CrLf line endings. PAD 4 allows support for new operating systems and drops old ones, but oddly it excludes Windows 8. It has finer description categories. Extensions are now placed in separate files. The new PAD format does not support a backlink URL (Uniform Resource Locator) because backlinks are intended to trick Google into increasing rankings. When Google notices, they punish both the PADSite and the site with the backlinks.

Most of the fields are self explanatory:

Tricky PAD Fields
Field	Notes
Program_Name	Human name of the program. Do not embed the version number.
Program_Version	Program version number, usually containing a decimal point.
Program_Cost_Dollars	In US dollars
Filename_Versioned	deprecated
Filename_Previous	deprecated
Filename_Generic	deprecated
Filename_Long	deprecated
File_Size_Bytes	Size of the entire distributable zip in bytes. Bare number.
File_Size_K	Size of the entire distributable zip in K, i.e. kilobytes = bytes/1024. Bare number.
File_Size_MB	Size of the entire distributable zip in MB, i.e. megabytes = bytes/(1024* 1024). Accurate to two decimal places. Bare number.
Program_OS_Support	Which OS (Operating System) es will the program run under. The definitive list is posted as part of the PAD Specifications. Here is the list in a somewhat more readable form that it appears in the XML-based PAD specification. Some sites still expect the old PAD spec list. I email such sites to prod them to update to the current spec.
Program_Specific_Category	deprecated Despite its name, this is the broad category for the program. The definitive list is posted as part of the PAD Specifications. Here is the list in a somewhat more readable form that it appears in the XML-based PAD specification.
Program_Category_Class	Category class and subclass specified as a single field with :: separating the two parts. The definitive list is posted as part of the PAD Specifications. However submission sites usually leave out some of the categories and add their own. Here is the list in a somewhat more readable form that
Keywords	Make sure this field has no trailing punctuation. PADGen does not enforce this but some submission sites do. You can provide this list in various other languages.
Char_Desc_450	PADGen insists this field contain no newline characters, (embedded, leading or trailing). Unfortunately you can’t see them in the PADGen editor. To get rid of them, I often resort to editing the *.pml file with SlickEdit. PADGen is just being futzy trying to protect you from relying on alignment that will be reflowed by a browser displaying the field. XML permits newlines wherever you would have a space. If PADGen wants unusually tidy files, it should automatically convert newlines to spaces then trim lead and trailing spaces. I wrote the author to get this corrected. He said he has little time, since PADGen is a volunteer effort. It is such a frustration  // convert newlines to blanks and trim lead/trail blanks desc450 = desc450.replace('\n',' ').trim(); You can provide this text in various other languages.
Char_Desc_2000	This long description should be complete in itself. The end user will see only one of the descriptions. It is not a continuation of Char_Desc_250. There is no point is carefully aligning your description. This is XML. It may be reflowed. Avoid any high ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) characters or entities. You can’t count on those displaying the file rendering it properly. Avoid any &, < or > even if they are not being used as HTML. Some sites reject PADs with URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) in this field, even ones not hyperlinked. You can provide this text in various other languages besides English.
Application_Screenshot_URL	*.png, *.jpg or *.gif, not *.bmp. Should be 200 × 200 or larger.
Application_Icon_URL	*.png, *.jpg or *.gif, not *.ico. Should be 32 × 32. Some sites accept *.ico files, but that is not kosher. A few sites refuse *.png. A PADSite should make a copy of the icon, convert it to their preferred form and serve it locally. This prevents malicious substitution of icons with pornography or advertising.
Application_XML_File_URL	full URL of where the master copy of your PAD *.xml file is posted.
Primary_Download_URL	full URL of where to download the program.
Secondary_Download_URL	Another full URL of where to download the program in case the first in not-available. Having multiple download mirrors gives your program extra status.
Distribution_Permissions	Free form text to describe licensing, restrictions and purchase options.
EULA (End User Licence Agreement)	Free form text to the end user license agreement, e.g. LGPL (Lesser General Public License), public domain, non-military use only.
PADRING	PADRING is an extension that lets you insert a list of all your other PAD URLs or a related set. You can also list other people’s URLs. This will help propagate knowledge of these PADs around the web. PADRING is not widely supported. It has been supplanted by the more compact, easier to update PADmaps. Its main advantage is it spreads your PAD URLs to even those who refuse to understand the PADRING or PADmap protocol.
PADmap	PADmap is an extension that lets you insert a reference to a list of all your other PAD URLs or a related set. This is an improvement on the PADRING idea. The advantage of this scheme is you don’t need to keep changing your PADs when you add new programs. All your PAD s, including obsolete ones, automatically point to the latest list, in my case at http://mindprod.com/pad/allpads.txt with a PAD extension that looks like this: Unfortunately, the padmaps.org people who invented it have gone out of business. PADGen will not let you use any entities or HTML in your descriptions, not even hex entities. You must encode all your accented characters directly in Unicode UTF-8. Futures Unfortunately there is no backlink field. Many PADSites insist you link back to their site as a courtesty for them listing your PAD. This has to be fed out-of-band in the PAD submission form. The URL where the backlink is on the submitter’s website should be a field, at first a non-standard field, in the PAD itself. It also should be made clear the submitter has 24 hours after submission to set up this link and upload it to his website. The PADSite should not be a dork and reject backlinks just for adding or deleting a www prefix. They should point to the home page so they will not go stale if the PADSite reorganises. There is one backlink page URL in the PAD for all PADSites links. The list a 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.
NewsFeed	an extension that lets you broadcast knowledge of your RSS or Atom newsfeed that describes updates and relevant announcements about your software. Details.

NewsFeed Extension

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.