Every Wednesday's code

Today we had our usual meeting at school and revised the progress of our project. So far we'd been having some problems validating the table's fields, specially when updating, but we managed to solve them. During this reunion (maybe the last one before our first delivery) we pimped our GUI adding some nice icons instead of word-buttons. We also gave some format to the table's fields so whenever an update is made, the new values are formatted and the whole table looks unified. Finally when everyone finished their work we uploaded our changes into our googlecode page, one by one we managed to merge the changes correctly and obtained a pretty good working copy. After assuring our files were fully working, we cleaned-up our project's page deleting useless files.
Now we're almost ready to make our first delivery, just a few tests needed to be done and we'll be good to go!
Although this first stage was tough, the team worked extremely well. Everyone participated, which allowed work to flow as planned. We still have a lot to work on for the final product but keeping the good work will help us finish it in no time!

As always you can find some pictures in our gallery. Good Luck and don't forget to rate our blog's info on the right side bar.

Designing the Graphical Interfaces!

Today we meet in school and dedicated ourselves to programming and designing the graphical user interface (GUI). We achieved an outstanding result, and we'll soon be ready for the first delivery!

Today we had an exciting day. When we were joining the interface with the methods of dbmain.clj, we realized that some of them still had some details that required correction, but we managed to fix them relatively quickly; given that our clojure programming skills are improving considerably!.

We have come a long way through this day, and if everything goes o.k., we'll only need to unite all the windows that we've created with the main menu and give them an appropriate general format according to the Java Look and Feel Design Guidelines. But first, we must make sure it's working properly.

It is also important to work as a team, as today we had many small problems and together we managed to each and every one of them. It's fantastic to see how the project is taking shape, and we are beginning to see the results of our hard work. However, we should not live in the delusion of extra time, but keep the work pace. We believe that we can go on a little further of the first delivery while working constantly, in no hurries and maybe without having to meet weekends anymore ! :D.

After a long day, now it's time to go to bed and gain energy for tomorrow, as we'll continue working on the project. Let us not forget that we have other courses to attend too!

To check the code produced today, please visit our googlecode page

Coding on Sunday!

Today we met in Alfonso's house. On one hand, we discussed the problems that we had when writing the methods of the dbmain.clj implementation. This class is very important and must have no errors, as it controls the access to the database. Thank God, it seems like it's working O.K. now, and we can freely manipulate the contents of the database. We faced some problems when writing in the database file, but we think that they happened rather because of our inexperience with Clojure and with the Random Access File API instead of having bad programming practices. We spent a lot of time debugging and getting the code to work, but we think that it's part of the process implied in learning a new programming language.

On the other hand, we began discussing how the GUI is gonna be and look like. We made some sketches and a general idea of what the user options should be, and we've decided to split classes creation responsability, so everyone can work at home. We expect to get everything done by next weekend, so we can integrate and present it to the class on March 23rd.

To see the photos check out our Gallery

Why a New BSD Licence?

As you can see in our googlecode page, we chose a New BSD License for our project. Generally, BSD licences are considered to favor IT developers, while GNU licences are considered to favor end users, so why did we choose the BSD license? The reason is simple. We don't to tie IT developers to use our code just for open-source projects, but we still want to make a contribution to the emerging Clojure community. More importantly, we don't know if we are going to need this code someday for a non-open project, e.g. when working for a Software Company. We might continue coding in Clojure, and we want to be able to incorporate this code in future profitable projects. We think that this a fair decision, since we are now taking advantage of many free Clojure examples and explanations available on the Web, and we think that we've got to contribute as well. Hopefully, we'll be helping others, but it's not part of our philosophy to continue this way forever, nor forcing others to do the same.

So please go on! you may check our code freely, and (re)use it as well for whatever a purpose you want, either open or close. Just read carefully the conditions of our license and respect them.