15.MyISERN-1.0-Green

link to MyISERN-1-Green: http://www2.hawaii.edu/~eykim/myisern-xml-1.0.1007.zip

JAXB: JAXB is a great tool to convert XML to Java, and vice-versa, and was very easy to use. Since everything was set up already, I didn't really learn too much about it but from the code that I did inspect, it seems like one of those tools that "just works." The one thing I needed to learn was how the marshaller and unmashaller worked, and from there I pretty much could tell that I could just pull information as I wanted. JAXB's marshaller and unmarshaller could be used to change XML data to a file and the data in the file was converted to a type: collaborations, organizations, or researchers from which I could pull information that was previously in XML format.

XML: With each assignment I start to learn more and more about XML. This assignment probably helped me the most because I wanted to go above and beyond and create a jar file that was command line executable. To do this, I really had to dig deep into all the previous assignments and see what I needed to do to create a jar file. It was pretty simple using the format of the previous assignments but I gained a deeper understanding of the file structure and formatting of XML. Before this, when I looked at the build file, it really looked like a jumbled mess. Now I look at it and I can see clear distinctions within the code, kind of like when you first start looking at Java or C++ code. It seems really fuzzy and confusing at first but with more practice and a common standard, everything starts to really make sense. I think I came away from this assignment with that sense of clarity.

Group Software Development: In previous ICS classes, working in groups really wasn't enforced too much. But in the real world, it seems like most of the time, you will be working with another person or probably an entire group of people trying to get a single project done. It's probably safe to say that more often then not; you will be working people in real life, so I really liked working in a group. My group tried to do Extreme programming and found that it was extremely helpful. We could get better code done in a shorter amount of time. We would often catch each others mistakes and sometimes find better ways of doing things. Although we only met twice and the second time our third partner wasn't there, we pretty much got the whole assignment done within those two meetings. We even tried doing SCRUM programming and at times that worked well too. I think each specific situation calls for its own programming method.

MISC.: One of the problems that I ran into during this whole process was waiting for people to catch up to me assignment wise. Since my other two partner didn't really finish the previous assignments completely, one more so than the other, it really took away at the amount of time we could have spent coding. Luckily, it gave me time to go set up all the pages for svn, discuss, and the google project hosting. Other than that, I think I had a great group and I feel a little sad that I'm going to be with other people. I just hope that I don't run into a lot of problems with the other groups.