Shambling Towards Perfection

Sprint 3 is now complete. It went fairly well, although again I had trouble finding time to work on the project. There were some other frustrations which I'll detail below. I finished 3 backlog items: Run automated tools e.g. FindBugs to ensure code is correct and clean (8 hours), Write a shell script or similar to start the database server and tomcat (1 hour), and Fix the build.xml to only copy the correct jars to the web app's lib directory (15 minutes). Then there was the stuff I worked on a lot and didn't get done... I started on both Restrict the login page to only allow access via SSL and Fix the email notification system so that it works with the CS department email settings. For the former, I got SSL redirection working if the user navigates directly to the login page (e.g. http://localhost:8080/ProjectManagementSystem/login.html) but despite my best efforts I couldn't figure out how to get it to redirect if the user goes to the root of the web app (http://loc...

I met with my adviser for the first time last Wednesday, and we decided our next meeting would be September 24 and then we'll meet every two weeks thereafter. Since the 24th would fall in the middle of a sprint I decided to extend the first one to end this Saturday, the 29th (I was also under the weather several days last week, so it was a good move all around). On the 30th I'll upload all my code to the version control system my prof has set up (svn) and configure everything so that it will run on the department servers. I'll be demoing my latest work at every meeting, so every other Sunday will be configuration day. I realize continuous builds on the department machines would be better but it's not exactly practical, so I'm settling for continuous builds on my home machine. Since my last post I have successfully configured Tomcat to use SSL and jbcrypt . The latter involved writing a custom realm but turned out to be quite trivial; I simply extended JDBCRealm ...

From the lack of updates you can probably guess that I didn't accomplish much this summer. Life got in the way as I had too much else to do. But now the fall semester has started, I'm officially registered for just 3 credits for my Masters project class, meaning I'll be doing another 3 in the spring and graduating in May instead of December, and I'm back at work on the project. I finally started sprint 1 on September 1. So far I've primarily been researching for the "restrict access to the HSQLDB" and "change the way passwords are stored and transmitted" backlog items. After vast amounts of googling I've discovered how to do these things and for the second decided on which methods are needed. I'll be using SSL for just when the user logs in and the bCrypt algorithm as implemented in jBCrypt to hash passwords before storing them. Other than passwords there really isn't any sensitive info in the app; if people didn't reuse pass...