Today's assignment is MyISERN-1.0.
Lessons Learned
Group Work
My partner on this project was Kevin English. He had to be on the mainland from Friday until Monday, so we probably did things a little differently than other groups.
Kevin set up the project on Google and did as much of the code as he could before he left. While he was gone, he could get email and a web browser, but didn't have his development environment. So from that point on, he worked on the wiki and I worked on the code.
We ended up not really using the "discuss" Google group and just sending each other email directly. With more people that might have been bad, but with just two it was not a problem.
The main lesson for me was that if you can divide up the work very clearly, by area or time or both, it helps lessen the effect of physical separation.
JAXB and XML
I didn't really learn anything about JAXB or XML, except some basic background on what JAXB is for. We only used it a little, and the method calls were already in place by the time I started working on it.
The Code
When I started, the first thing I was going to do was add unit tests for the code that Kevin had written. I immediately ran into that same problem we've had before with unit testing code that prints out its results. That really seems like a flaw in Java because it gives you an easy, obvious way to write your program and then makes that way impossible to test.
I'm still not completely satisfied with the output. It prints out a table, but the "description" fields are so long that they often wrap around and mess up the display of the table on the screen. It looks okay in the Eclipse console, which doesn't wrap, but when you run it from the command line, it looks messy.
In the end, I figured it was better to have the output literally be a table than a non-table that looks nice when you wrap it.
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