[GSoC09] Devcathlon UI and other random thoughts

Past week:
This week was more targeted in testing and running Devcathlon's game events. I got a chance to look over a few of the events as well as make improvements to the user interface. I honestly had more fun with the UI, since it gave me the chance to be creative. Also this past week was mostly angled towards packaging for GSoC's mid-term release.

UI Improvements:
The first time you visit Devcathlon, you are presented a functional, yet not very pleasing UI that included a conglomerate of panels and links that semi-worked correctly. I decided that if I needed to start somewhere, then it had to be this very initial page. From here, I devised a new scoreboard, that updates frequently as the visitor sits back and watches things change on screen. It's more dynamic, much more intuitive and incredibly fun to look at.
In the process of creating this component, there are some things that were notably noted for future reference and eventually documented.
Dependencies:
Wicket's date-time package extension requires a tool called, Joda. It took a while to figure out the reason why the page could not initialize when coding a date-time picker with the following:

private final Date date = new Date();
...
DateTextField dateTextField = new DateTextField("dateTextField", new PropertyModel(this, "date"), new StyleDateConverter("-S", true));
...
form.add(dateTextField);
dateTextField.add(new DatePicker());
...

Igor was quick to notify someone else with the similar problem by concluding that it would be easier to use a project management tool, called Maven. It's probably the most reasonable thing to do in the future since Wicket projects are now more geared towards using this to properly manage project builds, documentation and resolving dependencies. However, Devcathlon is quite comfortable now in just using Ant as a building tool. Ant serves to be flexible and less standardized than Maven, yet Maven does enforce good practices in folder structures and offers other great project organizations.
** (07-2009) UPDATE - All projects for Hackystat will be switched to integrating with IVY soon.**

This week:
- Resolve issues with mapping JAXB classes via HyperJAXB. (Complete DB)
- Setup and install Devcathlon to public (test) server
- Test game events and pull live data
- Incorporate new UI

Other notes:
Since other tools were needed to properly build the project through our continuous integration, via Hudson, I didn't want to risk failing a build. I'm keeping things in-house with my mentors until Monday when we set up a proper test server where I could install exactly what I need and want on it. Currently testing will be done by one user (myself) and eventually by my fellow Hackystat GSoCers.
I also mentioned earlier last week about switching to Netbeans 6.7, but my project mentor, Philip suggested that I should stick with Eclipse since we currently only have one sensor that supports Eclipse. On that note, this would make for a great plugin idea for Netbeans to support sending Hackystat sensor data via the IDE. Hopefully someone with the time could venture this avenue.

[GSoC09] Closing into Devcathlon v2.0

Premise:
In this blog entry, I'll point out the improvements and near completion of Devcathlon v2.0. I know that mid-term evaluations are coming up for GSoC, so I'll need this week to concentrate on the core features. The things I hope to accomplish from now on are almost purely aesthetic, along with minor tweaks to the functionality here and there. I must apologize for my absence last week due to some personal health issues.

Hibernate and me:
For the last two weeks, I've been working on the database through the use of Hibernate. I got a chance to encounter some pretty neat, hidden surprises along the way; one of which deals with performance issues, due to the fact that Hibernate is so "lazy." Hibernate uses this to preserve memory space by not loading the entire objects from the database, but rather proxies at run-time instead. So I ran into some Lazy initialization errors that seemed very annoying at the time. For simplicity, I decided to lift the burden by just disabling this feature on certain mapped entities. However, I did take the precaution to apply some fetching strategies (join rather than a select) for an implicit get() or load() data retrieval. Overall the database is coming along, I did have some questions about class entities that require mappings, such as generated classes from JAXB, Project.class. This is required by most of the other class models (Team and Match), and I'm wondering if the class would need to be moved out as a User defined Type (by extension of Hibernate's UserType) or a custom subclass. Since this is a generated Java class from XML, I'm afraid to take either steps. Considering the time I have left, and mid-term evaluations are right around the corner, I've decided to move onto the UI goodness.

The Good Stuff:
I went back to some elements of our first designs of Devcathlon and took the time to rethink about certain areas. Everything is starting to come into perspective, as far as the design goes and we will be seeing some evidence of this in the following 2.0 release. Below is a list of in-progress features being worked on:
Key features:
Search engine (browse for entities: User/Profile, Team, Match)
Calendar selection
Improved Scoreboard main page - total revamp with live updated listings
CSS improvements to inherited Panels and Base pages.

Trying something new:
At the mist of an update, my Eclipse IDE went a-wal. It just stopped liking itself, or rather hating me... I had difficulty with start-ups, error messages would pop-up saying NoClassDef, and editors could not open up anymore. I got frustrated with trying to remedy this problem, since it has happened before. I like Eclipse and all, but It has given me a history of some disappointment. I can't blame it entirely, since I know that most of this is due to the fact that I install other third-party vendors (plugins) in Eclipse. This is the reason why I made my recent move over to using NetBeans 6.7. In all honesty, Eclipse is perfect for a lot of situations but it calls for other resources that might not be perfectly integrated with itself natively. On the other hand, NetBeans almost feels a lot like developing on an enterprise IDE, like MS Visual Studios, etc. It has all the languages I develop in on a daily basis built-in, offers additional services like connecting to databases, creating custom web services, and most importantly it's still FREE.
As for racking up dev-time, I'll have to resort to using Hackystat's Tickertape UI for now.

Conclusion:
In the final mid-term week of GSoC, I'll attempt to update the documentation, make improvements to the UI and ready the package off to my mentors. It's been quite a ride and I hope this project satisfies a need to many developers and project managers.