Sprint 2 Review

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Yesterday I met with my advisor to demo what I accomplished in sprint 2. Of course most of it was behind-the-scenes so there wasn't a lot to show, but he seemed pleased with my progress thus far. We discussed the security issues I've been researching and the insanity of trying to secure a web app in general, and he said security would be a good topic to discuss in the project summary paper thing I'll have to write. So I'm already getting a general idea of what will have to go in the paper, which is good.

We also discussed what I hope to accomplish in sprint 3 and some plans for sprint 4. Right now there's a ton of steps involved in setting up the project for the first time (configuration files to edit and put various places, editing of tomcat's xml files, creating the database, etc. etc.) and so he'd like to simplify all that so that he can deploy my project on his own machine more easily. So we agreed that that will go in as an item for sprint 4. I'll certainly learn some new things there... I've never done any sort of installation script before so it will be uncharted territory for me.

Other than that there wasn't a whole lot to discuss. With the "Move properties out of the session so that users can do things like have multiple browser windows open and bookmark pages" issue I'll hopefully be starting on the road to improving some of the hideous database-related code (let's just say that when I started this project, I had zero database knowledge and didn't know what joins were) which causes some pages to load extremely slowly even when there's not much data in the database. I'll have to rewrite most of the database code for that issue so this time I'll be writing it correctly after completing (and getting As in) 2 semesters of database classes. Those performance problems were one of the big concerns he had, so I'll start to address that this sprint.

And that's about it.

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