Wednesday, July 23, 2008

4th of July Update

Development Environment



Over the 4th of July weekend I had a bunch of time to work on my thesis under some strange conditions.



  • In a house in upstate NY


  • Babysitting my sleeping kids

  • No internet connection

  • Forgot all my reference books

  • Listening to the Spiderwick chronicles on my ipod







Data Import



My past experience has shown me that there is no substitute for real data in development and testing, so I'm focusing on getting the data imported from the legacy system into the new rails based central controller.



The data is realitively well structured in XML and csv files, but it is organized differently than it will be in my new relational DB which means there some work to do transforming the data as I import it.



So Far I've completed the import code for:

  1. Basic project/site meta-data 

  2. Bug list definition

While listening to the Spiderwick Chronicles with no access to reference material I stubbed out the code for importing:

  1. Owner & Team Lists

  2. Bug list Projections

There's a lot of work to do building the relationships between the tables and I've captured that in  FIXME: comments in the code.



Source Code



Having deleted useful code more than once in the short time I've been working on this project I decided it was time to start using source control.  Once I got back to an internet connection I set up a repository.



I'm hosting the project on google code at http://code.google.com/p/thesisdev/ and using the subclipse plugin to handle checkins.



The one thing that bugs me is I checked in non-working code. It's not something I like doing, but I really didn't want to lose any of the Spiderwick work. 



My next job is to clean up all the pseudo code from the 4th and finish the import scripts.

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