Technical Difficulties

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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 various things. Originally I used:
  • Apache Commons (lang) -- to escape characters properly for html
  • JavaMail -- to send mail when users make certain updates
  • DBUnit -- for its ability to export a database to XML
  • SLF4J -- required by DBUnit
  • opencsv -- to export the database to CSV
To this I'll add JUnit for unit testing, start using DBUnit for testing, and use more of the Apache Commons components, including dbcp to manage database connections (opening/closing connections slows down my app significantly), dbutils to more easily manage resources, and possibly logging (either that or SLF4J, whichever is easier).

So that's the plan for now. I've been procrastinating pretty badly, but I have my product backlog filled out, prioritized, and estimated (for the highest priority items anyway) and I have selected items for the first sprint backlog. I will hopefully start the sprint tomorrow. I'm hoping to manage at least 15 hours a week, but I don't know how easy that will be. Ideally I'd love to do 20, but I suspect that's totally unrealistic.

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