Finishing with Coding soon

I know that my last post is already quiet a while ago (considering the circumstances) which does not mean I wasn’t doing a lot. I finished the Website with most of the Features I wanted to implement and made some testing. For the final tests I set up a server at my home which was accessible through dynDNS and let some of my friends register and have a look at the website and check out what mistakes they might find. At the end only a few minor bugs where left. Including a few Elements which are not clickable, a small Bug with String Translation and a few Strings which have not been localized. Though I know how to fix them I don’t have the time to play around with them. I will have a look again before the presentation to fix them.

Back to the Messenger

I will still work on the Messenger over the BankHoliday Weekend and try to get as much done as possible. Messaging finally works since today, though it is still a bit buggy. I will do my best to still implement a few more features like: Sound Output, usage of Hash Values for password validation and file transfer. Monday after I’m back from the St. Patricks Parade I will finish my work on the messenger as this date is my personal Deadline for Coding. From Tuesday on I will extensively work on the Dissertation.

Bug Fixes and Home-Page

I was mostly working on the Social Network. I now definitely dropped the networks/groups feature as they are way too much work for a feature.

I now started working on the Home page and designed to Blog page. The rest of my work was dedicated to bug fixes and finishing unimplemented code like cookie handling or adding support for International Youtube URLs (didn't know that they actually use different domains for that).

As another part I installed Tomcat + Oracle on my old PC in Germany which I can access from the Internet through dynamic dns and port forwarding. The main reason for this is to make public tests in later stages and to check how easy/difficult it's gonna be to deploy the whole system. For now it worked fine except one point.
Oracle is (in my opinion) an extreme resource eater even if the database is tiny. This in the low specs and a low upload at home slows down everything.
The Specs:
CPU: 450MHZ Pentium III
RAM: 256MB (Main reason for slowdown)
HDD: 2x 12GB (In addition very slow ones)
NET: ADSL 6mbit/512kbit (low upload speed, but ping times are alright)

The main purpose of this is to make user acceptance tests and to get responses/suggestions from others. In a technical view it will also allow me to later check connectivity through a Firewall/Proxies though I doubt it since for security reasons at my home I only mapped Ports above 1024 as well as I am not planning anymore to implement HTTP communication within the Messaging app until April)

Next Steps

• Finish Home Page
• Finish Profile Page (most stuff around it works)
• Make Buddies Page
• Make Block User/Release Block page
• Make Messaging Page - At least show the inbox and refer to messenger
• Add String Tags in File Handling for Localization
• Send out Localization File to translators
• Testing

Time Organization

I have set myself a deadline of two more weeks (from last Sunday) for development. Basically I want to finish working on the Website next Sunday and work on the messenger for one more week. After that I will only work on the dissertation till the beginning of April when it has to be submitted.