Be afraid, for now I give you: The DCiJ Assignment, or as I call it, “The Ugly One”.
DCiJ obviously stands for “Distributed Computing in Java”. Didn’t know that? No wonder you’ve got nothing better to do than reading this blog.
I guess the reason for this assignment must be that our lecturer fell in a coma sometime before Easter. When he woke up he had completely forgotten that he had given us workshops every week for over half a year. And that he had us do group work. And that he monitored our attendance every week. So because he has absolutely no idea how we’ve been doing all year he gave us an assignment. Apparently the same condition overcomes him every year. He should probably have a word with his doctor.
The amazing task is to whip up a shop system for a car rental service. You pick your dates, you get the available cars, you pick your extras, you fill out your payment info, you book a car. Shouldn’t be that hard, right?
Now the fun part is that we are required to use Kodo JDO for the data storage. Wouldn’t be that bad if it didn’t force me to work in Windows, because apparently serious programming (Java programming, that is) can only be done in Windows. You know, not that kiddy PHP bullshit you can do on your Macintoshes and Linuxes and camera phones and what have you.
Now, Kodo JDO is a filthy whore. Well, not really. But I’m just completely at a loss for a description of the feeling of being raped up the ass by a moody piece of shit software. Maybe Kodo is a digital drug-addicted cross-dresser who likes to give you some though lovin’. Yeah, close.
It works when it wants to, or maybe just totally at random. I bet some guy is sitting on a mountain somewhere rolling a pair of D20 to determine the use of every single instance of Kodo in the world.
My application is up and running by now, after I had to get some serious knife-work done on IE. If the IE team ever wanted to make their Javascript error messages any more useless they could just remove the warning sign and have the app play another of those clicking sounds whenever something is broken. Yeah, that would do. Or IE could just kick you in the balls (Assuming that only real men on real computers have the guts to do serious programming).
Oh, I need some documentation as well. If I rip out some of my teeth, maybe the tooth fairy will bring me a shitload of sequence-diagrams instead of sweet cash.