[GSoC09] Overcoming a hurdle

If you were wondering why I haven't been blogging lately, then it's because I hit a "wall." I thought after taking the first few blocks off I would be free of trouble, another layer gets built, but only stronger and thicker than the last. I have to say that this project, in addition to this summer's workload has had a profound impact on my performance as a programmer. I've essentially realized my limits and as usual would draw insight from these experiences.
So I cleared my head this past week and started to extract what I had done on the branch copy (for db development) and slowly transitioned to the main interface in the trunk of our repository.

Below are some notes for myself and to future developers of Devcathlon:
Issues building a DB with a pre-existing system designed by multiple users:
These are the issues I ran into with Devcathlon that seemed to really give me the most problems.
The integrity of our DB:
There were many places in the application where (when we would test) that checks were made by the DB and not by the application before hand. This was mainly due to how DevcathlonTestHelper was built, to create and immediate delete a record, without concerning itself with other dependent constraints. In some instances, this would occur while testing team resignations which required two teams with a user being the team owner of one team and a member of the other. So by deleting one of the teams, this would cause a constraint error which is totally valid but not handled by our initial test helpers. Modifications were needed in this area.
*A special note on a test db: It would be beneficial to setup a Devcathlon test db for creating and dropping tables while developing in Devcathlon. This would keep your tests cleaner and ensures the integrity of all records.
In addition to changes to the DevcathlonTestHelper, the DevcathlonConfiguration needed to be initialized for all events defined in the configuration.xml file. This was needed in order for all event subclasses to properly map with the abstract event class upon declaring any particular event. Errors would occur when an event was not initialized by the ConfigurationManager.
The other problem relied on the fact that certain classes needed to be mapped (mirrored) that were originally built via JAXB. I.e.: The Project JAXB generated class needed to be mirrored in Devcathlon and renamed as TeamProject for persistence.

Thankfully seeing the "BUILD SUCCESSFUL" message (noted @ 5:45am this morning) appear after running 'ant -f verify...,' I finally felt a large weight lifted off of me. I'm now happy to know that the DB is settled and I'll be able to sleep better tonight.

This week:
Test events and single matches (08/19-20)
Work on UI improvements (08/19-21)
Clean-up old wicket panels (08/19-21)
Documentation: Installation & Issue notes (08/22)