MyISERN-1.0

The source code can be downloaded from here.
Our Google project page is here.

The objective of this assignment is to get us started on building the social network application for ISERN, as well as start using SVN and Google project hosting. In this assignment, I learned about JAXB, XML Schema, group software development process, and I am more familiar with SVN, project hosting and XML.

JAXB: This application is very powerful when it pairs up with XML Schema. It took me a couple of hours to figure out how JAXB Marshaller class works. It basically provides a bridge to connect Java and XML. We can easily convert data that is defined by XML Schema to Java classes, and it is done almost automatically.

XML Schema: This is a way to define data in XML as far as what I understand right now. It might seem a little bit complicated at first, but it really makes sense once it is converted to Java classes by using the XJC compiler. Since XML is becoming a more and more popular standard to hold data, I think it would be very useful to learn about and get familiar with Schema.

SVN: It works very nicely for team development. By having a master copy of the working code, we can still share code and make progress without meeting face to face. I personally keep the source code for commit and update in a separate folder than the workspace folder in eclipse. This turned out to be a good choice I think, because some of my classmates informed me they are having problem when they commit or update the code straight from the workspace folder in eclipse.

Google project hosting: This turned out to be a much better service than what I expected. It helps us organize the project in a consistent manner. However, I do not really understand the purpose of the Wiki pages functionality. They seem to be only some text files with a .wiki extension. Also, the naming restriction of these Wiki pages is quite weird: It does not allow spaces or some special characters. Nonetheless, Google project hosting is satisfactory for me.

Group software development: I am lucky enough to have a good group for this assignment. We meet twice for long period of time during school, which made us finish most parts of assignment. We also tried pair-programming during the time we meet, and it was very helpful. Many errors or potential bugs, which might take several minutes to discover if we writing the code individually, were caught right at the time when we were writing the code. I do think it improve the speed of producing high quality code. For the Scrum methodology approach, since we were doing pair-programming, many tasks were accomplished together, but we still tried our best to make everyone to do everything.

JUnit: Once again, I feel a little powerless when it comes to void method test case in JUnit, especially the System.out.println() method. Since the objective of this assignment is to print out tables, which obviously should be using void method, the test cases are more or less impractical. They seem to be just for the purpose of fulfilling the Emma coverage. We tried to use Boolean as a return value to do error checking for these print methods, but the data in this assignment is all given by the XML files, thus we cannot even produce an error case in the testing, which makes the error case never being executed.