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.