Shambling Towards Perfection

Yesterday I met with my professor for a demo of the pieces I had working; he was satisfied with it. Then we discussed my plans for the next sprint and through to the beginning of next semester. During the next sprint, I intend to get the entire application running again at the very least. I'm also hoping to start on the list of new features (discussed below) that I'd like to explore; my adviser was open to me doing any/all of them, although as he put it they're really for my own personal development/education rather than requirements from him. Of course the entire project is pretty much an exercise in personal development, since I already know how to make working software, but anyway. My goal with the project is to make an application that's as professional as possible, so I want to include some of the bells and whistles you'd normally expect from a commercial application. This includes things like resetting a forgotten password, locking an account after too many...

So on Sunday I finished sprint 5. It went fairly well, although I didn't have as much time as I like, despite it being a 3 week long sprint. I was out of town for 4 days, plus there was that whole Thanksgiving thing, so it came out to be more like 2 weeks after all. Considering the amount of time I had, I think it went ok. There were a few oddities and bumps in the road. First, I was highly annoyed when I discovered that in JDBC the table name/alias isn't included in ResultSet column names . Instead, you have to alias the actual column if you need to distinguish between column names in the result. Grr. Second, I discovered that it's really kind of a pain to call static methods using JSTL .  Since I use static methods in virtually every JSP to format the output for HTML/links/etc. to ensure user input doesn't do whacky things, this is a problem. For now I'm putting off rewriting the JSPs to use JSTL, because I'll have to write custom EL functions and maybe tw...

The goal for sprint 5 is the same as for sprint 4: to improve the database access code and the JSPs, as well as move Objects from the Session to the Request. The sprint backlog items, however, have changed substantially. For all of the following pages in the web-app, I need to rewrite the JSP and rewrite the servlet code; some of them have had their database code rewritten already but for the parts I didn't complete during the last sprint, I also need to rewrite the database code. These are really all at the same priority level, so I'm not bothering to give them a rating. Page Points Users 1 User 2 Task 4 Projects 2 Project 3 New User 1 New Task 1 New Project 1 New File Link 1 New Comment 1 Instructors 1 Application Configuration 1 Blocking Tasks 3 Most Recent Tasks 3 Unfinished Tasks 3 The total points for this is 28, so I think it should be do-able in 3 weeks.