Spamalot

This week began the development of the email alert and the scheduled task component of the project. For the email alert we wanted the system to email the user a list of books that are due. For the scheduled tasks we wanted the program to perform a scheduled task. That way we could, for example, have the program check everyday if there are books that are about to be due.

Since we were told that it wasn't too difficult to code, we decided to split the work with me working on the scheduled task and my partner working on the email alert. For my part, first I had some difficulty juggling the data types. I had to parse a double argument and use it as a long for one method and a int for another method along with figuring out time in milliseconds. After creating the Wakeup class for executing the schedule task I realized that I had to somehow run the program without calling main again. Eventually I came to the conclusion that I had to move most of the the code from the main method to the DueDates constructor so that I could execute the program outside the main.

Because of the "simplicity" of this part of the project we met twice this week for 30 mins. Next week we will more than likely meet up for longer since I expect to be given something more difficult. When we met I had issues with my JAVAMAIL_HOME argument where the program will only run if I removed it. Turns out it was somehow conflicting with the mail.jar in the lib/ext of the Java installation. I moved it out of there and redirected the enviromental variable to its new location. Later on I realized that in order for the DueDates.jar file to run correctly I needed mail.jar back in that directory so I just copy and pasted it back in.

Working on version 1.2 was actually in some ways more difficult than 1.1. I definitely got stuck more often in 1.2 than 1.1. In 1.2 had to move around large sections of code in the main. In 1.1 I had to remove more code and add more code than in 1.2.

This week we manage to get code that will fail verify on our local system but pass in Hudson. Because we didn't have system variables for emails in Hudson we had to hard code them in the Junit test case TestMailer.java. Since the host was mail.hawaii.edu it would only work when the system was hooked up to hawaii.edu network. To test email on my system I used smtp-server.hawaii.rr.com.

Next time I want to get more practice with test cases and I want to reconsider how the code is structure. At the moment it works but it isn't a very elegant solution.

A distribution of the new version of the project can be found here.