COMP9031 - a short review

As mentioned before, I am currently doing COMP9031: Internet Programming and am about to take its mid session test in 1.5 hours :)

What I like about this subject is, it’s pretty hands on, the lecture and the assignments are closely linked. The lectures are mainly discussing Java internet tech by actually looking at codes, so this course it’s quite “low level” compared to more on the conceptual level like COMP9316.

I am happy to learn stuffs from Deitel’s Advanced Java How To Program and then use them in the assignment. For instance: I’m currently wanting to change the session tracking algorithm that I use for my assigment (using hidden input in HTML form as I am accustomed to do) and play around using Java’s HttpSession. I am not a big fan of this Deitel book, mainly because the codes are:

  1. Using older version of Java
  2. The style doesn’t follow Java Convention (hm i forgot the actual name, but there’s a standard on how you should write your code like where to put linebreak etc2), look a bit messy to me.
  3. BUGS everywhere!!! Not to mention the performance issues associated..

Anyhow it’s good introductory book on the ever extending Java features, I just hope it doesn’t produce bad programmers.

The lectures aren’t not too much of a value to go to, as lecturer just “read” the lect notes and very often lost track of the codes and have to ask the students to find “which line that does something”. I don’t understand why the lecturer doesn’t push doing assigment in linux system and in fact encouraging development in Windows and then test the assigment in CSE linux lab, pretty stupid I say, why do double work?

Encourage the students to use linux for the assignment and then easily port them to CSE. This particularly tedious process to do as assignment 2 requires installation of Tomcat and MySQL, the enviornment variables etc2 will look quite different on Windows and Linux, the inexperienced students will undoubtedly spend meaningless hours to get the assignment to work on “both” windows and linux, I only need to make sure that it works on linux at CSE and at my home.

Got a deeper understanding of servlet and JSP compared from COMP9316. A little touch on J2ME. Will learn JMS soon (well today if I dont skip the lecture to study and write this entry :( ).