Monday, September 17, 2007

10.Stack

Here is my file for stack...
http://www2.hawaii.edu/~eykim/stack-eykim-5.0.916.zip

This was actually one of the first project that I got an early start on. I'm also glad that I worked with a bunch of friends. Without their help, I believe I would have been up all night, pondering subtle details about eclipse errors that really had nothing to do with the homework at all. But due to their help, I was able to complete all five tasks.
Although most of the problems that I ran into dealt with very obscure details such as, "I can't get ant to work on the command line" and "Where are the layouts for the JavaNCSS report page?” it would have taken me hours on my own to find the answers to these problems. Evenly dividing the work between all of us, helped to alleviate the stress and lighten up the atmosphere. I believe the biggest problem that we ran into was trying to figure out how to write the ant task for JavaNCSS. It really was like learning a new language in just one day. I had to continuously research online and read over the code to get a firm grip on just what each tag did. I've never used xml before this but I feel that after looking at and developing code for the JavaNCSS, I have a decent grasp on xml. The other problems I ran into were just a result of not reading the manuals enough or just doing a simple bit of research on the topic.
As for Ant, I believe that it is a great program. It seems like a hassle for a non-trivial program but I can easily imagine how it could literally "save my ass" if I had a monster of a program with hundreds of classes and methods. Aside from making sure that all of my code was recently compiled, the tests that I could easily run and the information from programs like "emma" really help me to become a better programmer overall. Before this assignment there was a number of methods that I didn't even know existed.
There really aren't too many standards that I don't understand the motivation for. The "tabs" rule is a great rule because I've run into multiple problems when transferring code over from one computer to the next or from one platform to another. As for naming conventions, number of tab spaces and the like, it really depends on your style but having one common convention really makes it easy for everyone to be on a level playing ground. Also using an IDE like eclipse where you can add formatting standards makes converting to the standard very easy.
As for SCLC and JavaNCSS, SCLC is nice because it tells you just how many lines may differ from each version of code but I think that using JavaNCSS is more efficient because you can use it to figure out just when you should refactor. Using the code metrics in JavaNCSS, I can easily see when I don't have enough comments for a certain method or if a method is getting too unruly. As opposed to SCLC where I get hard facts about just how big my source code is in general. I really do prefer JavaNCSS. Now, if only I could use it efficiently.

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