MP

I had had it in my mind to blog about the MP while we were still working on it, but there just wasn't any time. There was so much to do. So far, being at O&B has been about living, eating, and breathing Java; when I get it into my head to write about how I've been faring, it happens during moments of inactivity inconveniently situated in between the daily routines of work and more work. Plus, I'm still not used to the daily commute from home to work and back; this is the first time I've had to commute on a daily basis, and the three to four hours that commuting eats out of my schedule really drain me. Anyway, I'm looking forward to the extra five days of even more work...there's still so much to learn. :)

I had a hard time understanding how actions work. I had little trouble writing and testing DAOs since we were using a database and SQL. As for views, the Struts 2 tags took some reading and experimentation for me to get used to them. It was a bit frustrating at first, especially when I couldn't tell if the view or the action was the source of a problem. In the end using actions to maneuver data from one view to another was very confusing for me, since I often had trouble tracing the flow the action followed. I wasn't getting the results I expected based on the mappings in struts.xml. During the code review I found out that XT and his group had had the same problem; our code for adding and editing ctegories was almost the same as theirs, and apparently there was some extra code missing to keep the validation from skipping ahead. Right now I really want to finish what we started, although it's going to be difficult for me to adjust to using Spring. At any rate, I hope that what I wrote can be reused during the merging of the MPs.

After the first week

Java Boot Camp feels like a summer CS class: lectures, quizzes, exercises, even exams and machine problems. The main difference is that we're in an office building in Makati, and my classmates come from other universities; some are already employed. Classes start at 9 and end at 6, and that's when we finish early.

We've already finished module 1, and right now my brain feels like it's been assaulted with several condensed chapters of a Java textbook. I'm still grappling with some of the concepts, especially encapsulation. I guess I need a lot more experience in using those concepts to improve my code; it's still hard for me to translate my notion of objects into concrete code. At any rate, I like the idea of object-oriented design and the flexibility it promises; with enough practice I ought to get the hang of it.

The first machine problem gave me a run for my money. I got my code to work almost according to the specifications, although I had trouble implementing my idea of the library books as objects. I had thought of each separate instance of a book as one particular copy, but I hadn't thought of a way to distinguish copies of the same book. I also had trouble deciding on which collections to use to store the books; that was the first time I used Java collections. Being my first crack at object-oriented design, my code tripped up on some of the best practices, such as having methods that do only one thing. Succeeding projects will probably drill those best practices into my head; nothing teaches better than hands-on experience.