6-14-2001 (Week Two)

Alright, I am in my second week of the internship. So far, I have been looking up "log" like programs, that have features similar to or exactly like, the project I am working on. I am finding nothing. And I mean nothing -- I found 12 things that have some concievable relationship with this project but nothing that really resembles it. The project seems to be a program that will keep track of what webpages are being added when users add information to the database that VRV-ET runs from. I am really confused because the program doesn't sound hard to write -- it even sounds kind of fun to do. I can see the usefulness of it and I understand somewhat how to do it.

6-19-2001 (Week Three)

I am terrible at writing a journal but... I will try to keep this more up to date. I have to give a presentation to the geology professors today in order to introduce them to my project. I hope it is ok, I wasn't really sure of what to present, and the slides are really boring-looking. But...I guess they are ok. The presentation is supposed to be a sort of story-board thing where each page represents what the user would see if they used the program -- it is really simple (I have a feeling the coding is not going to be as simple but....). Alright, back to see if I can add anything into the presentation.

6-22-2001 (Week Three)

Hello again. It is Friday. Isn't that beautiful?

I am currently re-designing the front end of the tracking system that I am putting together for the VRV-ET stuff. (BTW, for more information on the project which I am not really giving here, go to the project page.) I met with Doug and Emily (professors of geology here) on Tuesday to go over the original design. They pointed out some issues with the design (so did Jan, Bree -- a student working on the geology webpages, and Josh -- the person who did most of the stuff for VRV-ET). So this week I am re-designing and learning some of the stuff for the back-end.

I am learning how to code up servlets and .jsp files because that will be the back-end for the program. While I know some Java, and have programmed CGI, learning servlets has proved to be kinda difficult. But I finally wrote a servlet that worked. I get to go see what problems I will encounter on .jsp files.

6-25-2001 (Week Four)

Today I have been working on designing a throw-away model of the update program in order to determine what little problems I might run into. I have been trying to learn how to use an XML parser with JDOM and it is not working well. After I figure out the parser, I need to parse the XML log file and just output the data in that file to the browser. Of course, I anticipate problems with that since the second part sounds much too easy ;)

6-28-2001 (Week Four)

So today I have finally gotten the parsing of the XML to work, thus gettting the throw-away model to work. I was so happy, I almost ran through the building screaming...well, not really, but I was happy. Most of my problems really extend from not understanding Java as much as I should -- but that will take time to completely comprehend the mystery that is Java. Monday I will work on tightening up some code and making the output look nice -- and possibly adding an extra feature to the code to make my life easier next time I work with the code.

7-10-2001 (Week Six)

I missed last week's reports because I was really busy on Tuesday. Wednesday was the fourth and I went to Mt. St. Helens when I promptly got sick the next day. So this is pretty much a two-week report that really only covers about a week and a half of work.

I have the first throw-away program done. It takes in a date from a webpage and then it outputs any changes that are after that date. The XML page is really simple. The program merely reads the information provided by it in order to decide what should and should not be shown to the user. Very simple.

This week I should be making up a new architecture wiht Josh in order to make reports easier to produce for the variety of items the program deals with. Basically, I need to add outlines, glossaries, and bibliographies to the abilities of the log program.

I have eached the halfway point but I am not sure about what I have really accomplished. It honestly seems like I will be leaving without much stuff done.

7-17-2001 (Week Seven)

I finished the new architecture for the project. Basically it starts with an html page that sends a request to a servlet with reads and XML page and puts the information from the XML into a bean. The bean is sent to a JSP page (which is part of the HTML request) which then decides what output to show. I like this architecture. I have finished six reports in a day from the same information that I had before. The main probelm I had with it is that the errors are impossible to understand as there were three different new places that errors could be happening at and nothing to point where the error was coming from. Bluh!

My project for this week is to add outlines to the reports. This is going to be hard. Basically the outline can be changed in many ways. The pages within the outline can be changed. Something in the outline can be changed. Things in the outline can be moved around within the outline. An almost impossible amount of things to take into account. The hard part about the outlines will be figuring out how to put them in the log. Once that is done, it is easy sailing from there.

7-31-2001 (Week Nine)

Well I missed last week's entry because my boyfriend was here and I took some days off to explore Eugene with him. We had a blast.

Currently on the project, i have solved how to represent the outlines in the XML pages. The current XML is here. It took awhile to figure out, but it will work just as I need. I decided that certain problems would have to be worked out when the implementation was being done.

Speaking of which, I am almost done with that. I decided to make a class that would construct the outline for me from the XML. In essence, the outline is a linked list that contains division objects. The division objects contain four lists: a current subdivisions list, a deleted subdivisions list, a old names list, and a list of changes to the division. The current subdivision list and deleted subdivision lists contain subdivision objects. The subdivision objects contain a list of changes to the outline, a list of changes to the page content, and a list of old names. Seems to work so far.

I have to finish the outline reports, and then comment everything as well as tighten up some very bad code. Then Jan would like me to make a tutorial with screen shots for the final report on the webpage. I hope I get it all done. This is turning out to be as challenging and fun as I hoped at the beginning of the summer. Very nice.

8-6-2001 (Week Ten)

My final week here -- well actually, I will still be here for the beginning of next week, but that will be mostly checking out and packing stuff. So it doesn't really count.

I have finished my program. It all works. There will be a tutorial soon. That is my goal for this week (or what I have of it since Wednesday and Thursday, most of the summer people will be going to the mountains to relax and hike. )

I decided not to do three different outline reports and kept it a one -- since someone will have to integrate my code into the larger webpage maker, they will also be adding different types of reports, including glossary and bibliography reports.

I got the code tightened up too. Some of the jsp code was very messy and needed re-done. I also changed the interface a little. Overall, last week was really easy.