Seventh Client Meeting

Hi,

Well we had our seventh client meeting.  I think it went best out of all our meetings thus far.

As an aside, it should be mentioned that I changed a few things in light of slightly shifting requirements and fixed a few bugs since last time.  They took some time, but they're pretty uninteresting to discuss--and no design issues came up anyway.

One issue that came up was how I had changed a lot of fields from private to protected.  I explained that this is because those fields were used in an inner class, which technically doesn't have rights to private members.  However, the Java specification allows this (see 8.8.9), but it's technically discouraged.  If you set your compiler warnings high enough, you'll get it.

The other issue was the code review.  Ackley looked almost exclusively at Alex's code, so I felt kinda bad for him when Ackley ragged on it.

However, his complaints were pretty trivial, and were mostly stylistic (lowercase class names, e.g.).  I think this is overreacting and irrelevant.  If we want to use a different coding style, it should be up to us, really.  Coming from a strong C background, all my classes are lowercase; both myself and the rest of the group were therefore pleased that Ackley didn't happen to see any of my code.

In addition (and despite my denial of this), my code is apparently very dirty looking.  That's probably because it implements the most complex algorithms, is poorly commented, and makes non-standard use of syntax.  For next week, my primary concern will be to change my code so as to look simpler than it really is--because that's apparently what is expected of Java programmers.  Also, by fiat, I'm changing my code to use standard Java naming conventions.

Ian