Project Demo

Posted April 13th, 2006 by Nadia Chaouch
Categories: Marketing

It’s done! Last week was the capstone project demonstrations. We’ve been so busy completing the project that we haven’t had enough opportunities to blog. We’re sorry!

TeamSuperGood demonstrated all the great functionalities of Impresario. We kicked butt and we looked good doing it (in our team shirts)! We had lots of people interested in the project. Many SOEN 390 students have shown interest in extending the project and we are also developing our own plan on what functionalities we would like to add. A fellow TeamSuperGoodmate is working on making a demo available online, so stay tuned for that!

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank those who helped us with the project through their various contributions and insight: Candy, Mustafa and Dr. Constantinides.

XMLUtil

Posted April 8th, 2006 by Eric Lo
Categories: Uncategorized, Java, XML

During the development of Impresario, we’ve built many many utilities to help us. One of the utility was the XMLUtil. The javax’s XML tutorial isn’t too helpful. We went through many hours of research and finally compiled a set of functions that allows us to convert strings to Documents, convert Documents to File, validate documents, convert File to Documents, etc. If anyone need this util, please comment on this post and leave me your email address. Once I get your info, I will contact you and delete your post from the list of comments (I will only delete if it has your contact info, but don’t expect me to delete it on the same day you post it!).

(This includes the person I talked to on Friday about the XMLUtil. If you’re reading this, please give me your email again because the one I have does not work. Thanks.)

Prepared Statements, Again!

Posted March 28th, 2006 by Chris Robinson
Categories: Programming, Java, MySQL

Okay, earlier this year I figured out that the reason for our binary data problems when retrieving stored files from the database was the use of PreparedStatement. Well, we don’t use it for files, however we do still use it in so many other plaves in our code. We kept getting some recurring errors the most common one being that the placeholders had not been bound with objects before running the statment. Basically, PrepareCall() failed. We stepped through multiple times until we found an example where the error was found and found that in fact, there was no problem with the bound SQL generated by the PreparedStatement. So the error was being thrown for absolutely no reason that we could fathom. So, I did the exact same fix as for the binary data retrieval bugs and it fixed the problem. There seems to be major problems with the PreparedStatement calls and so now we just grab the sql that has been prepared, and then run it directly. For those who don’t remember how this was done, here is some sample code:

//Prepare the statement
PreparedStatement statement = prepareStatement(query, variables, values);

//Strip out the object information
String statementString = statement.toString();
statementString = statementString.substring(statementString.indexOf('-')+1);

//Original query execution
//return statement.executeQuery();

return statement.executeQuery(statementString);

Just as some notes, prepareStatement() takes the query and binds all the values to the string. The next line gets the value of the PreparedStatement as a string. This will yield something similar to this:

com.mysql.jdbc.ServerPreparedStatement[3] - call impr_linkable_object_find_connected_by_type(2, ‘org.impresario.core’, ‘user’, ‘org.impresario.core’, ‘project’)

As you can see, there is information about the object before you get the sql. The following line strips everything before that first - so that you are left with only the sql call itself which is then executed independently as a string.

Suddenly, we no longer have that annoying problem popping up. :)

We’ve got fans!

Posted March 17th, 2006 by Ka Lun Sze
Categories: Team

A few of the team ran down to grab some free food from Reggie’s today. And we bumped into two of our fans, Frank and My-An. It feels so nice to know people appreciate our work. Thank you. =)

Frank and My-An

Adopting standards

Posted March 17th, 2006 by Ka Lun Sze
Categories: Technology

I’ve written a little post about the frustrations and things to looks out for when adopting a standard. I’m not going to mirror the whole article here so I’ll just give you a link to the post on my personal blog: The Horrors of Adopting Standards.