Another stupid SY33 coursework

We’re currently working our way through the second SY33 coursework but like the first, it’s a pointless exercise. It doesn’t test your understanding of anything to do with SY as we have to do things like consume the Yahoo Search web service - all the code for which is provided by Yahoo in their developer’s library. Your actual task in this coursework is trying to work out what the coursework wants you to do. That is a task which turns out, is very difficult.

Yet again the author of the coursework spec is unable to grasp numbering (it’s worth noting I believe the specs had different authors so no one person is to blame). The first coursework had two sets of concurrent numbering systems while this numbering system starts at 0 instead of 1.

The real issue though is how unclear the coursework spec is. It randomly jumps between instructions, setup information, hints, etc. You have to spend a lot of your time picking out the actual spec from the spec itself. Once you have, most of it doesn’t work. You spend more time trying to get the setup instructions working so you can do the work than doing the actual work itself.

To demonstrate my point, I started writing my coursework in gedit but got a load of errors. The solutions didn’t help, the only other solution I got, and I got this repeatedly is, “oh, use Eclipse.” So much for the school’s policy of avoiding a focus on specific software. I did but this just produced more errors. There are loads of extra classes you needed, Dan kindly email them to me but it didn’t help. I then added all the ones Si told me I needed, still didn’t solve the problem though.

We ended up concluding that I had identical code to Si and Dan’s so it couldn’t be my code. Kieran eventually traced the error down to the WSDL2Java tool not producing all the files I needed. So I spent some time looking into that but in the end found that I did have all the classes.

Eventually, at around 2:30, it just started working randomly. This left me way behind even the people that had just turned up that day to do the coursework. I eventually managed to get everything else sorted and moved onto servlets around 3:30ish.

That was another mission. 5 hours I spent trying to get them to work. Kieran spent a good few hours on it too. It never did. Because of lack of time in technical coding? Nope, of course not, but because setup was yet again the mission it shouldn’t be. We were having to compile everything in Java 1.4 for some reason. This produced an endless string of errors that resulted in me spending all night in the lab and still not getting servlets working.

Wrap-up consisted of having to answer the few questions and also print out a copy of my readme file to include in the physical hand in - why? What purpose does that serve? This detailed how to get it running like they had any chance given pretty much everyone got beaten down into using an IDE because it was such a mission to get it working from the command line (although I did eventually manage this in the late hours of the morning).

Seriously, what is the point of this coursework? To test my patience?

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This entry was posted on Friday, December 7th, 2007 at 6:44 pm and is filed under Rants, University. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.