Shambling Towards Perfection

The first sprint, which I will hopefully start tomorrow, has a goal of improving the application's overall security and reliability. Right now I have some pretty egregious security violations, such as plain-text passwords, and most errors get swallowed, so it's very difficult to tell what the problem is when something has gone wrong. So I need to start remedying that. The sprint backlog items I have selected are: Priority Description Points 300 Add error checking, unit testing, and integration testing using JUnit, DBUnit, FindBugs, etc. 16 290 Add logging and propagate exceptions instead of swallowing them. 8 280 Restrict access to the HSQLDB to the server on which it is running. 2 270 Add additional sanitization of input and other security measures 8 260 Change the way passwords are stored and transmitted so that they are encrypted 4 The sprint will be 2 weeks long. My story points are sorta kinda "ideal man hours" but really are more relative to each ot

I have finally overcome some technical difficulties, including finding a CS department machine that was actually up so I could retrieve info I needed that had been stored with my original code, and remembering that I had installed 32-bit Eclipse on my machine originally, because 2 years ago when I set it up Eclipse didn't play well with 64-bit Java. The latter resulted in my shiny new 64-bit Java 7 not working with the old version of Eclipse. Getting 64-bit Eclipse in the latest version (Juno) solved that problem. All the technologies, libraries, plug-ins, etc. I need for the project are now fully updated to the latest versions, and I was able to get my project running on my home machine (using Tomcat as the application server). It had been so long since I'd set things up that I'd forgotten how, so I did prove that the instructions I wrote up for my professor to follow worked very well. Go me. I have also been looking more into Java libraries that may help with variou

I've been working on my Masters degree one class at a time for the last 4 years (working full-time doesn't leave much time for either classes or homework). In May I finally finished up all of the required coursework, so now I just have my project left; that will be the (initial?) focus of this blog, as I created it solely because of the project.  I hope that by documenting my process, design decisions, etc. here, it will serve as a head-start on the required paperwork and documentation for the finished project. The project is called, for now, the Project Management System, and is based off of a project I completed for Advanced Software Engineering in the spring of 2011. It's a web-app using HSQLDB as the database, Java for the data access layer, Java Servlets for the application layer, and JSP/CSS/JavaScript for the presentation layer (to the latter, I intend to add JQuery and JSTL in the near future). A presentation  on my project as it stood at the end of the class is a