Final Push

It's almost time to call it a semester, but there is still a lot to do before we are done.  We have run into a couple little bugs that we need to fix to make our project sturdy and reliable.  One thing that I was surprised by is that screen resolution can really mess things up.  When using existing applications on my phone, laptop, and desktop the application always magically scales.  Sometimes not super well, but pretty good.  When trying our application on different devices, a lot of the styling gets really messed up.  It has been harder than I thought to fix this problem.  In fact, before trying the application on different devices, I didn't even know that this would be a problem.

Another very unfortunate bug that we have is that whenever we try to access our site from a phone's browser, we get an error saying that this type of address is unsupported.  I again did not think that this would be a problem.  I just figured that a browser was a browser and it should work.  Even though I carry my laptop with me everywhere, I really hate having to pull it out and I always search the web on my phone.  If this is going to be a practical application for college students, this issue needs to be resolved since students practically live on their phones.

The schedule generator is going rather well.  I have always struggled with JUnit testing, but I wrote some tests for the generator that make us pretty certain that it is functioning correctly.  These tests are not as robust as Ackley's tests (whose are?), but I am trying to get to that point.  One weird issue I ran into with making tests is that for the meeting time, start date, and end date, we are using the java.util.Date class.  When my test was receiving the JSON object from the backend, Jackson was unable to parse the fields of the JSON into these Date objects since we did it in an odd way.  After some internet research, I figured out that I needed to make time and date deserializers so that Jackson knows how these fields should be parsed into Dates.  This made the test suite work and I was then able to use assert statements to make sure the object was correct.

I am excited for the demo on Monday and I think everyone is going to be really impressed.  We really need to meet our time limit this go-round and talk about our business model.  If we have a killer presentation, I have the utmost confidence that our project will be selected as the winner of this semester.