Fridays with J2EE

Well, it is another Friday here at boot camp and we are all ready for the weekend. What a week this has been. Everyone got their weekly project completed (mostly functional anyway). Working with the 5+ layered architecture has been a learning process, but we are beginning to grasp the patterns (no pun intended). You just have to remember that every layer must hand over the correct objects to the layer it communicates with. It is still a little confusing to me, but with more experience working in the system it will become second nature.

Next week is the JWEB course so we will get more involved in Servlets and JSPs and we will finally get to talk more about STRUTS. Fun times friends, fun times...

Until next time.
Les Martin

Behold.... the power of bug.

Coming from a programming background that was not as healthy as some others might have been I am just now getting used to practices that should have been planted into my thick skull from the beginning. For instance, in my IDE [most IDE's] there is a little bug image I can click, and if I had set a break point then ~voila~ I can step through my code and see exactly what is going wrong before it goes wrong. The simplest problems within code are often easiest to overlook. Debugger helps step line by line through execution in your project and #BAM# you find the problem. If I had only known about this in college my life would have been a lot easier. I can remember nights of printing out C++ source and reading line-by-line through it to find the simplest of mistakes that the compiler has overlooked.

So, for my Computer Science I class that I may someday teach, no matter what language we use, I will cover the following things early in term:
Unit Testing
Debugging

These things make life so much more understandable (well, not life, code).

Ok, there is my morning rant.
Until next time.
Les Martin

The Common Architecture

Wow. The Common Architecture Classes we are working with is a huge bundle of seemingly abstract functionality (oxymoron?). Just the small project we are working on this week can be a bit thick to step through. It is pretty neat what they have set up for us to use as a foundation, but it can sure be a head-ache getting everything setup correctly on your machine so that it builds correctly. Now we are working in groups of 2 checking code in and out of a CVS.

This weeks project is pretty straight forward, just add functionality to what is already there. This gives us a chance to really wrap our minds around what is already happening within the system. By the end of this training we should know this stuff in and out (mostly) but for now it is a slow process. There are so many classes up the heirarchy you may have to go up several super-classes to find out what a simple bit of functionality is. In this long run it will be easy to grasp, but for now it is just mind-boggling.

On another note, it is both welcome and regret to be doing this as a web project. Welcome because I am familiar with Web technologies and what goes on, plus I haven't actually worked with any J2EE projects so many of the tools we deploy are new to me in practice. Regret because as mentioned I've done web developement (but not on this scale so that is another plus) and I was looking forward to deploying different types of apps. But to tell you the truth without sounding really redundant, there are so many new tools to use in the J2EE world that it does feel like I'm in new territory. I am looking forward to moving on into the projects and getting more familiar with STRUTS and the other technologies and patterns surrounding it.

Current Recreation: Reading Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
Research Shopping list: JUnit/Unit Testing materials, STRUTS references

Until next time,
Les Martin