Believe it or not, I have been coding since the year 2015. As the title implies, the first university that I attended (right out of high school) was the University of Massachusetts – Lowell. Interestingly enough, within my very first textbook at UML, I would be exposed to another kind of “UML” – Unified Modeling Language. At this time, Unified Modeling Language was little more than a reference at the back of the book; there was more written on the subject, but my mind was concentrating on concepts such as how to “calloc()” in C.

Fast forward 5 years, and now Unified Modeling Language takes on a larger role; it is being used for visual representations of classes and inheritance in Java code. This can be seen with the following YouTube video, “How To Make Easy UML Sequence Diagrams and Flow Charts with PlantUML” by user “Be A Better Dev”. Essentially, the video shows how Java code can be written and then turned into a UML chart for a visual representation of classes and their features.

Personally, I selected this particular video due to the fact that I enjoy using YouTube more than any other social media; this way, I can use the app for educational purposes as well as recreational ones. This nine minute video is a great way to learn about how to code for UML in a format that is digestible on a busy schedule (when at work, for example). In addition, I expect the material to be applicable to aspects of the course (such as homework and exams) due to it being another form of practice. Practice, practice and yet more practice is the most important way to retain any type of coding/programming knowledge, and UML is no different.

It’s crazy to think that something barely glossed over from my educational journey five years ago would be so prevalent in the present day. However, it makes sense; programming practices such as using an arrow (->) operator or parentheses for a method are given new meanings when working with UML. Extending this further, programming syntax can create additional effects within the PlantUML environment. For example, placing an arrow on one side or another of an entity will effect exactly where it extends from on said entity.

As a final note, I am glad that I am able to work with this newfound technology. Ever since my days at UML, I have been wondering about when my code would leave the IDE environment and tackle more “lively” features (such as a graphical interface). Thanks to Unified Modeling Language, I now have a method of making my code come to life.

Article Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xObBUVDMbQs

From the blog CS@Worcester – mpekim.code by Mike Morley (mpekim) and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

The article I’ve decided to read for this blog entry is titled, “Getting Started – An overview of Markdown, how it works, and what you can do with it.” The reason I picked this article is because it is connected to our first homework assignment. Our first homework assignment has us working with UML class diagrams and when I clicked on the web IDE on GitLab, I was brought to a file that was written in Markdown language where I would have to add my Java code and create PlantUML class diagrams. I’m not too familiar with Markdown language and since I would be interacting with it for my first homework assignment, I figured I’d do some research to learn more about it. 

The article I read starts out by defining Markdown language, “Markdown is a lightweight markup language that you can use to add formatting elements to plaintext text documents.” The article then goes into explaining why people use Markdown. I’ve learned that Markdown can be used for essentially anything: from websites, documents, notes, books, presentations, email messages, to technical documentation. I also learned that Markdown is platform independent and that the content that is created on it doesn’t get locked into a proprietary file format like Microsoft Word. 

Next, the article discusses how Markdown works. This process can be generalized into four steps:

1. Create a Markdown file.

2. Open the file in an Markdown application.

3. Use the Markdown application to convert the file to an HTML document.

4. Render the HTML document to a web browser (or another document).

During this part of the article, we also learn more about Dillinger, a Markdown editor that combines these steps. It was useful for me to learn the name of this editor because if I were to ever use Markdown for myself, I now know a common and popular editor to do so.

Lastly, the article’s main ending point is that there are many different “flavors of Markdown” and that using Markdown with one editor may provide a very different experience than using Markdown with a different editor. Many of the basic syntax may be the same but there are extended syntax elements that likely differ.

One of the biggest takeaways for me is that after I finished reading this article, I looked into other kinds of markup languages and learned how they are different from programming languages and scripting languages. Unlike programming and scripting languages, markup languages are presentation languages that do not do logical operations. It’s safe to say that, now that I’ve learned about Markdown, I feel more confident moving forward with my homework assignment (even if what I learned was going to be only a minor piece of my overall assignment).

Article: https://www.markdownguide.org/getting-started/

From the blog Sensinci's Blog by Sensinci's Blog and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Recently in my Software Construction, Design and Architecture class, we have been getting into UML class diagrams. The class diagrams provide an understandable system structure and the relationships among the objects. Each relationship has a distinct visual representation based on arrows:

In this case, we started using Visual Studio Code and PlantUML to model class diagrams. I referred to the UML documentation that was provided to get a better understanding of how to display each type of arrow in PlantUML.

As shown above, there are three kinds of relationships that can be represented in PlantUML: Extension, Composition, and Aggregation. I am not totally familiar with the use of composition and aggregation as we’ve only been focusing on models that use extends and implements in class. I wanted to get a better understanding on how to read UML class diagrams and to be able to tell the relationships between the objects on the diagram.

With PlantUML and Markdown preview in Visual Studio Code, you can see changes to the UML diagram in real time as you modify the code. What you write in the code will reflect what shows on the diagram. You can also manually draw the relationship, which provides more customization such as arrow length, direction, etc. In addition to solid lines, you can use dotted lines to represent dependencies.

Extends is represented on a UML diagram as a solid line with an empty arrow. By writing that Class A extends Class B, you will see the diagram update show a line with an empty arrow point from Class A to Class B. Instead, you can also write Class A <|– Class B in order to display it on the diagram. When viewing the diagram alone, you can assume that Class A has access to all attributes and operations available in Class B.

Implements is represented on a UML diagram as a variation of the extension arrow, with a dotted line instead. By writing that Class A implements Interface, the diagram will be updated to show a dotted line with an empty arrow pointing from Class A to Interface. To draw an inheritance arrow on the diagram, you can write Class A <|.. Interface. When taking a look at the diagram, you can assume that Class A has access to the operations of Interface and contains the code for them.

I found the PlantUML documentation very useful as it contains basically everything you need to know about using PlantUML to create class diagrams. I also really enjoyed the functionality to modify the example diagrams to experiment with the features that you just read up on. Overall, I think that UML class diagrams are a good way to visualize a class structure. The arrows are easy to follow and help in understanding the relationship between classes.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Null Pointer by vrotimmy and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

For in-class activities of this week, we learned about modeling with UML class diagram. There were many important elements to compose a class, such as properties, operations, and association. However, my team got stuck at the “association” section, we could not clearly distinguish the different types of relationships between two classes, especially the relationship named have-a. Therefore, I thought it was a good opportunity for myself to learn more about the term “association”.

There are many articles and blogs analyzing about different types of relationships between classes. However, many of them look very complicated with a long list of different relationship types and some are very confusing. Fortunately, I found this article, entitled Association, Composition and Aggregation in Java, which finally satisfied my curiosity about “association”, because the content of this article is focused only into the definition of “association” and the analysis of its types which are aggregation and composition.

There are some key points that I have taken away after reading the article. First, association represents a relationship between two classes, depending on each situation, association can be one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many. Second, association has two special forms, which are aggregation and composition.

For aggregation, this term is also known as has-a relationship (a weak association), which is one way relationship and each entity of the relationship can exist independently. The author also provides a simple example to describe those characteristics of aggregation, which is an Institute has-a Department, and Department has-a Student. This is one way relationship because a department can have students, but vice versa is impossible. Moreover, if the Department class is removed, the Student class can still exist independently.

For composition, this is the part-of relationship (a strong association), and the two entities are dependent to each other, which means a class (child) cannot exist without the existing of another class (parent). For this definition, the author gives an example of Book and Library, Book is part-of Library. So, if Library class is removed, Book class cannot exist. In my opinion, this example does not make sense to the part-of relationship because I think Book still can exist without Library. Therefore, I have looked for other resources to find a good example for composition. UML Association vs Aggregation vs Composition is a good resource to provide real-life examples for each conception. Like the first article, this one also focuses on the analysis of the term “association” and its two special types, aggregation and composition. According to the article, I got an example that Head, Hand, Leg are part-of Person. Thus, if Person class is removed, Head, Hand and Leg classes cannot exist. For myself, this is a perfect example to describe the term composition.

In short, I have learned a lot of information and had a clear understanding about the term “association” from the two articles recommended above. I will apply this knowledge to design relationships between classes in my UML diagrams. Moreover, I believe the articles that I choose are good resources because their content is clearly organized with good examples. In other words, I would say the two articles complement each other, so it is good if readers can pull out the best parts from each article and be able to combine them consistently.

From the blog CS@Worcester – T&#039;s CSblog by tyahhhh and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

As my journey to find my very first internship as a software developer. I’ve noticed that the majority of the posts require Docker’s experience. From there, I realized that Docker is an essential tool for Software Developers and their professional careers. This blog is about Docker of what it is and also why it is necessary nowadays.

Docker is a container running time. A container is a standard unit of software that packs up codes and all their dependencies so the applicant might run quickly and reliably from one computing environment to another. Docker container is a lightweight, standalone, executable package of software that includes everything needed to run an application: code, runtime, system tools, system libraries, and settings

The good thing about Docker is it helps developers get their application to work on every machine. Also, the abundant app’s libraries and dependencies ready to be executed make Docker even better compares to its same category competitive. Besides that, Docker is lightfast and also very easy to maintain.

Also, running applications in a container brings many benefits to both developers such as:

• Portability: Once developers run their containerized application on their machines they also would be able to deploy it to other operations and be assured that their applications would perform the same as on their own.
• Performance: VMs are alternative methods for developers but Docker offers much more compared to regular VMs as faster to deploy, quicker to start, and smaller footprint than ordinary VMs
• Agility: Containers offer portability and performance help reducing time-consuming and make the process responsive and agile. Such advantages provide a better way to deliver the right software at the right time.
• Isolation: A Docker container that contains one of the applications also includes the relevant versions of any supporting software that the developer’s application requires. If other Docker containers have different versions of the same supporting software, that is not a problem because Docker containers are independent.

Most uses of Docker make developer life simply better while developing applications. But it does not mean that Docker could entirely replace the actual Virtual Machine. VMs are still much needed if we have to have a whole operating system for each customer or the entire sandbox. VMs are still being used as middle layers when you have a big server framework and many customers that using them. Despite many good things that Docker could bring to developers, VMs still has a firm grip within the industry and development cycle.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Nin by hpnguyen27 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Today, I will be talking about an article titled, “MongoDB : an Introduction” by Harshit Gupta on Geeks-for-Geeks.com. This article explains what MongoDB is in a simple format by comparing it to relational databases. He explains that MongoDB is a NoSQL database meaning it is non-relational. Instead of storing data in a tabular format such as SQL, it stores data in its document model which is much more flexible. This makes it similar to a JSON format (called BSON which stands for Binary JSON). When dealing with big data, it is a much better choice to use MongoDB instead of a relational database because it is horizontally flexible. This means that if the demands of the database grows, we can add more servers so that it can handle the change. While adding a new column to a RDBMS requires replanning of the schema, adding new fields to a NoSQL database is easy because it is schema-less. Another major feature is that MongoDB is a distributed database meaning multiple copies of data is stored across multiple servers making data recovery fast and reliable. The article provides easy to read bullet points on the features of MongoDB, when to use it, and also the differences between MongoDB and RDBMS. It also goes over the languages it supports, how to install it, and provides a list of major companies using it.
The reason I selected this source is because Geeks-for-Geeks has always been a trusted website that I will go to when having problems in programming or with topics in class. They always provide a well thought out, simple explanation for topics that seem confusing in a textbook. While reviews for Geeks-for-Geeks are mixed, it has always been reliable for me and I have never had any problems with it. For basic topics at least, it has been very accurate. The content in this article held up with everything I have learned about MongoDB already, and also, matched up with what other writers said about it.
I chose this topic/article because I thought it would be good for anyone in class who does not yet know what MongoDB is and would like to read up on it. In this course, we will be using MongoDB for our final project to store data so we will be using it in the future. I started learning about MongoDB with this article as a good introduction then took it to more concrete and informative websites to learn about it further. MongoDB is good to learn if you will handling large amounts of data in the future.

Source: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/mongodb-an-introduction/

From the blog CS@Worcester – Austins CS Site by Austin Engel and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.