Albaroud’s Weblog

Overview:

SSG for now, is pretty much done. A Select box has to be fixed, and redundant xml document links in teh results page have to be removed. These are trivial jobs. CDLG still has a fair amount of work to be done. All of this work centers around the form. The DVD header option does not work, and a lot of small state errors exist, depending on the distribuitionm and template selected in the single.jsp page. Slowly…approximate solutions converge to a perfect product; the convergence rate is quite a painful one.

Events:

- Bought Key Chains, some books for the employee charitable fund. Got JSP, Storage network and EJB books. Should be very useful for contract work
- It has been learned that David will be moving away from the management of the UIGR database and website. This means I can fill this void- and more specifically…learn SQL. From my experience with student jobs, SQL is one of the big 3 (Java, SQL, XML).
- SSG has been put on ICHAN temporarily, until dynamic class loaders can be implemented, or the MDS machine is ready to host it.

Project Notes:

- SSG:

- a VERY, VERY subtle problem was discovered with SSG: sessions were being shared. (“Session crossover”) It was originally thought that objects were being stored in the Application scope (false). Then, it was thought that special configuration files were causing shared (or one master, single session) on WAS (false also). Finally, synchronization and session issues with threads were thought to be the source of this (too complicated; there was only one thread!). It turns out (after a week of sporatic work on this problem), that the <%! tag for JSP pages was the culprit. The “!” causes any delcarations to BE SHARED AMONG sessions. Even the rational architects who tried to help me didnt pick this one up. Its quite amazing that one character caused so much pain. Owned.

- upgrade to FF2 helped to fix form problems

- CDLG:

- Much work on the form.jsp was done. Howver, sporatic errors (particularly, with box highlighting and error checking), still exist. These are slowly being destroyed, as a perfect form rises from my work.
- Some major bugs still exist in the back end of this web application. DVD header does not work, languages do not display for the single stream, things overlap, do not show up.
- A serious code cleaning/efficency assessment has to be done before this project launches. There are too many print statements everyhwere…and the form.jsp is a real mess.

- The barcodes dont work! It seems that this is not related to the barcode algorithm: as it was unchanged, and the CDLG V1 works fine (regarding barcodes). It might have to do with compression, or logo image spacing beside the barcode. Steve Murphy is dealing with this.

Mistakes:
- communication with team, organization has been unsatisfactory (at least i think: i could be doing a better job here).
- need to tackle problems more head on; less bandaid solutions.