MyIsern was a semester long project in my ICS 413 (Software Engineering) class that basically taught us how to use various building tools, QA tools, and different work processes. In the end, we built a small scale social networking page. It isn't really anything new but it did help us to learn tools such as Ant, JUnit, CheckSytle, PMD, and Findbugs.

This project had 4 developers: Jon Lao, Jian Fei Liao, Jared Sunouchi, and of course me. We each had our specialty but what i mainly contributed to the project was web design and working with putting all the components together on the page.

The code that I mostly had to deal with was the html and JSP pages. I had to figure out ways to incorporate the html and JSP together so that we had a visually appealing page. To tell you the truth, it was a nightmare. Since JSP pages uses their own tags, it was hard to really develop in an IDE such as Dreamweaver.

A snippet of out login code... 

"<stripes:errors action="/Login.action"/>
                <stripes:form id="LoginForm" action="/Login.action" focus="">"

This didn't really come out to much until we compiled the code and loaded it on to our tomcat servers. Also the links were difficult as well because we use a Ajax drop down menu box to display them. But since the links used stripes tags, they just wouldn't work.  

We also used a good amount of Ajax and Java script to add some functionality and aesthetic appeal. One of the tools I recommended and put into use was the lightbox script which allows you to view an image over the page your viewing with out having to navigate away from the page.  Here's a link to their page: http://www.huddletogether.com/projects/lightbox2/

All in all, it was a fun project although iy was a nightmare at times and i did end up losing a lot of sleep. But I did learn quite a bit because of this project. I've learned that J2EE is that the best for web development but it can be done. I also learned a lot about just developing software and working with a group to get a project done. I think that was probably the most invaluable lesson. Programming languages will come and go but learning to work with people, rather it's using a waterfall design or some agile method, will keep you afloat in this business.

 Here's is a snippet from our Google home page.

Purpose: The purpose of this site is to create a social network for the member of the ISERN program. A parody of Myspace, MyIsern is a basic social networking group that allows you to add, edit, and delete members. There is one community password that all ISERN users will share.

Capabilities: This website allows users to add, edit, and delete from three categories: Researchers, Organizations, and Collaborations. The three links above contain the three main features of the site.

Display: The display button will lead you to another site where you can click on one of the three categories. Each link will bring up a collapsible table that will expand if you click on the space in each cell. Expansion of the cell will bring up all the available information about that object. Clicking on the name of the object will redirect you to an editing page where you can edit the information about that object.

Structure: The basic structure of this site is an evolution of our MyISERN project starting first from using xml to store out data and JAXB to import and export that data from xml to java, to using Derby as an embedded database. The website itself has also grown from basic html to html with a little AJAX, JavaScript, and IFRAMEs. For more detailed explanation of how the site works, please consult our Developer's Guide.

 Screen shots:

Link to the google hosting page: http://code.google.com/p/myisern-black/