CS@Worcester

The previous past couple of weeks I have been neglecting the Modify Dosage System ticket due to switching gears and reading (skimming through parts) the Head First Design Pattern book. I found the book to be enjoyable to read and full of useful information. It would be a great book to somehow integrate into the new software development track. Design patterns play such an essential role in developing software that is efficient and maintainable that I believe it would be a great benefit for freshmen to become familiar with them. I enjoyed listening to everyone’s presentations, it was a great way to find out the books material without having to read it yourself. I believe that for the most part everyone enjoyed this project learned a great deal from their own and other’s presentations.
With book presentations over my plans for the final week is to (with help from above) be able to figure out how to correctly connect our new modify dosage system to the existing database that the current drug dosage system is using. The last time I was working on it I was able to input information but when I attempted to save the new dose it would get replaced with the current dose instead. I get the feeling that some function is being triggered dynamically somewhere which leads to my input getting reverted to the original dose. The calendar input box will select the date and save correctly and the save button also functions the way we want it to, so it’s really just the dosage button that is being a nuisance. Hopefully this week we can put some significant time towards this issue, I prefer to leave this class with my head held high and a modify dosage system works! TR and I plan to meet for a full day to see if we can resolve this issue. We also plan to work on our presentation so it would be great if we could get the system to actually work before Wednesday’s class.
Till Next Time,
ML

From the blog mlopatka by matthewlopatka and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

This week I made little to no progress on the modify dosage system. I have spent most my time on reading  the Head First Design Patten book. Seeing that the book is about 620 pages I was unable to truly read through all of the content, so I had to pick and choose certain sections to read and skim through the rest. My first impression of the Book was that I was intrigued by the outline of the book. The book does a great job keeping you interested by a variety of ways. Some of which include crossword puzzles, humor and plenty of interactive diagrams. The book also teaches in more of a conversational problem solving manner giving you the feel that you are actually working through problems with other programmers instead of dry technical explanation for the examples. The patterns covered in the text include the Strategy, Observer, Decorator, Singleton, Iterator, Composite, Factory, Facade, State, Proxy, Command and Template Method. An appendix provides a very quick rundown on a few more that didn’t make it into the main text. These patterns are introduced in a gently gradually growing manner that adds additional objects to extend the patterns as you gain the idea of and master array of patterns. I liked the way that the book made you think about and decide which pattern would most effectively solve the problem at hand. Throughout the book they introduce real-life problems that the author has you consider many possible solutions. He even has you consider solutions that aren’t the best idea. After the consideration of the solutions the author will even describe to you why the bad solutions are as such. The entire books examples are written in java so it fits in well with Worcester States courses seeing that the majority of the programming classes are java based. I feel that introducing design patterns in a freshmen course would be beneficial seeing that design patterns are used in every real world application. The book continuously stresses the idea of favoring composition over inheritance in most cases, as well as programming to an interface. The author tries to stress a “Has A” relationship is much better than an “IS A” relationship. The book uses a great example of this; the example states that not all bathrooms have bathtubs, so we probably don’t want to include a bathtub in a Bathroom class. I wish I would have had more time to actually be able to read the entire book, but with all of my other classes and final project going on I just didn’t have the time. I also want to try to finish the modify dosage system before this semester ends, so TR and I are going to try to find a decent amount of time to get together and work on it. We are still having trouble correctly data binding some of our textboxes and drug selection drop downs. A lot of the code comes from several levels of classes, so it is difficult finding exactly where implementation is needed. As I stated in my last post I was able to create a drug concept and add it to a current patient, so I will start to work on this project after this upcoming Monday.

From the blog mlopatka by matthewlopatka and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.