Posts Tagged ‘ POST

2009 final considerations. 2010 year of the Phoenix?

About a year after the creation of bd-theme-zen Wordpress theme, I decided to switch to a new theme. The new theme is monochrome

The reasons behind are simple: unfortunately, 2009 has totally been not a Zen year for me. Many things have not gone as I thought they should have been. Many other important things have been melted. Lot of things have changed.

I hope 2010 will be the year of the Phoenix, in which everything aggressively changes again and turns better. For everyone, for sure.

Therefore, I decided to switch to a new theme, monochrome by mono-lab.net. This theme is very modern, yet minimalistic and elegant. And surely, more nice-looking than those themes written by me.
I’m still happy with bd-theme-zen, I liked its initial orange version and I appreciated the glacial blue one I decided to switch to around August (the color switch was also significant for me).

But this is not time for being Zen. It is time to be reactive.

I wish everybody a fucking explosive 2010.

For those of you asking if I was spending my time to write this post on 2009-12-31 at 00.00: I wrote this post on 2009-12-26 and scheduled the publish to the beginning of the new Year.

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Update: first UML diagrams, some implementation thoughts

My third meeting at FBK is about to end. Today we discussed about some use-case, sequence and class diagrams I wrote during the week. Obviously there were lots of changes after the discussion and I will post them as soon as I’ve updated them. For the next time I will take a look at some implementation issues. The client side could be written using Android while for the server side we are seriously looking at Python and Django. It would be very interesting! For the communication, we are reasoning about XML-RPC, SOAP or a personalized Restful API. OpenTrip protocol might not be included in our implementation, as we don’t have the time to parse non-standard XML and adapt the system to use it. But this is not a final decision.
I will also write some simple mockups to test all the possible combinations.

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Announcing Pomotux, a free Task Manager implementing the Pomodoro Technique

Pomotux is  a C++ activity manager for the Pomodoro Technique created by Francesco Cirillo, a member of the XPlabs crew. The program focuses on the basic features of the technique. It does not focus on advanced techniques, such as the prediction of the number of pomodoros needed for an activity.

Activity Inventory Sheet

Activity Inventory Sheet


About the Pomodoro Technique

The Pomodoro Technique is a time management method that can be used for any kind of task. For many people, time is an enemy. The anxiety triggered by “the ticking clock”, especially when a deadline is involved, leads to ineffective work and study habits which in turn lead to procrastination. The aim of the Pomodoro Technique is to use time as a valuable ally in accomplishing what we want to do in the way we want to do it, and to enable us to continually improve the way we work or study.

The Technique is heavily explained on a 60+ pages book published on the website. Please visit the official website for more explanations.

A running Pomodoro

A running Pomodoro

We implemented Pomotux for the Software Engineering Project course, and it currently works under Gnu/Linux. Project page is located here. We are looking for coders to port it under Mac Os X, *BSD and Windows!

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BD-review

BD-review is a dynamic website to allow people to review releases (albums, demos, EPs, singles) of (young, unsigned) music bands. The project is the outcome of the Internet Technologies course at the Faculty of Computer Science of the Free University of Bolzano.  The requirements of the project were to build a website using a small subset of JavaEE technologies, without the use of web-frameworks.

Therefore, this project is not really meant for production use. It was made as a strong, working and correct base for studying JavaEE academically. It should be useful for every student (also non-student) willing to have an overview on JSP and study it. The code is well-written, uses MVC, and the whole project is documented in detail in a 20+ pages report.

A screenshot of a Review

A screenshot of a Review

I encourage to read the PDF report of the project. It contains detailed information about the analysis and design phases, as well as the architecture description, screenshots, problems found etc. Please read also the README file. It contains configuration instructions.

There is a running demo located on the evaluation server of the course, but I think it will be removed soon.

Quick Jump:

Vision

Requirements Implemented

Technologies Overview

Download

License

Vision

The aim of the project is to build a dynamic website to allow people to review releases (albums, demos, EPs, singles) of (young, unsigned) music bands. Users will be able to signal interesting materials and review them, while other users will be able to comment the reviews, too.
This web 2.0-oriented application should allow unknown talented musicians to achieve a higher notoriety but also to improve their productions.

Screenshot of the personal user page

Screenshot of the personal user page

Requirements Implemented

I report here the requirements of the course, all implemented by BD-review:
What BD-review implements is:

  • User Management
    • List existing users of the system
    • Creation of a new user
    • Deletion of the existing user
  • List and modify access rights of the users
    • check boxes with some capabilities (min 3)
  • User registration and login to the system
  • Items management
    • Users add, edit or remove items
    • Users comments or reviews items
    • Administrator can manage the comments (edit,remove, add)
  • Personalization
    • Salutation for a returning user
    • List resources that are new from the last visit
    • Customization of the layout for a class of users.
  • Techniques – MUST be used
    • Static HTML
    • CSS: all the look and feel must be in CSS files
    • Javascript: check input and manage menus
    • Servlet: Reading (parameters and headers) and writing headers and resulting page
    • Servlet: Session management with cookies and session object
    • Servlet: Redirect the client
    • Servlet: Forward to another page or servlet
    • JSP: Expressions, scriptlets and declarations Beans
    • DBMS access trough JDBC
    • Integration of JSP and Servlets (forward and include) using MVC pattern.

In addition, BD-review implements two Filters and plays with Regular Expressions.

Technologies Overview

  • J2EE technologies (JSP, Servlets and JavaBeans)
  • Database support (PostgreSQL 8.3) through JDBC 4
  • XHTML Strict 1.0 + Cascading Style Sheets 2.1 for presentation
  • Apache Commons for conversion and Bean population routines
  • Some utility methods found on Books and Internet (their provenience is cited in the sourcecode)
  • Javascript for confirmation system and form validation
  • Regular Expressions
  • TinyMCE rich WYSIWYG HTML editor
Screenshot: modifying a Review

Screenshot: modifying a Review

Download

PDF report of the project
Complete Source Code and Documentation (as Netbeans Project)

The Future

There will not be future developments for the project. It was not a real-life project but I will be very proud if you find it an useful example for learning JSP. You can also use it as a basis for developing a real project (also a University Project). You can do anything you want with BD-review, but please respect the license. I would be happy if you send me an email about your experience in using BD-review.

License

BD-review is released under The Gnu Affero GPL version 3! This is different from the license of the contents of the blog

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License
along with this program. If not, see < http ://www.gnu.org/licenses/ >.

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A useful list of Mind-Mapping tools for college students

It has been brought to my attention an  article containing a list of 50 Mind-Mapping tools for college students.

The list is categorized (free/open, collaboration, project management, multitasking, misc) to assist the reader in the decision. I know five of the programs reported and I have always used Freemind, therefore I find the post very interesting. Students should at least try to use Mind-Mapping tools as an alternative to summarize texts. Give it a try!

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Introduction To Software Testing

Elements and Concepts – A brief overview


Download PDF version of the whole document. You can browse the article online but I encourage the download of the PDF since it is written with accuracy.


Introduction

This document contains some basic concepts and definitions about software testing. It has been written for studying a part of the Software Engineering Project course at my University. It is composed by a summary of the intersection of more than 10 different sources, all of which are cited. If you feel that some contents of this publication belong to your intellectual property and it is not cited, please contact the author who is willing to correct any mistake.

The first part of the paper focuses on the definition of the most important key aspects of software testing. Then some information about input partitioning are given. What follows is a research about code coverage and two useful and famous tools, Control-flow coverage and Data-flow analysis. A complete example on using those tools is then given. The second half of the document also contains the definition of the most important software testing practices.

The goal of this tiny document is to clarify key terms and therefore become a base start for the reader to go in deep with the interested topics. Another goal is to give a simple but clear example about data flow analysis, as I realized that not all the people understand the examples around the Net.

Software Testing

Software Testing is an empirical investigation conducted to provide stakeholders with information about the quality of the product or service under test, with respect to the context in which it is intended to operate. Software Testing also provides an objective, independent view of the software to allow the business to appreciate and understand the risks at implementation of the software. Test techniques include, but are not limited to, the process of executing a program or application with the intent of finding software bugs. It can also be stated as the process of validating and verifying that a software program/application/product meets the business and technical requirements that guided its design and development, so that it works as expected and can be implemented with the same characteristics. 1

Read more

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