Progress Report for the week of October 30, 1997

Accomplishments:

Over break, Matt was able to get a good start on the coding over break. So far, we have implemented three of the container classes and the class to extract data from the file. Also, we have a VERY basic GUI. We are still learing the Java 1.1 event model and haven't quite decided on a coding style. The GUI currently will let you open a file and it will load it into memory and tell you status. There are still a lot of debugging print statements which will print to the console. The method that reads data from the .okc files is slightly more flexible than the one in XmdvTool. It does not require floating point numbers to have a "." in them, and newlines can be put almost anywhere and not affect loading of the file. It works with all the sample data files from XmdvTool. Performance seems to vary widely from platform to platform. The fastest platform we have tried was using Linux. A 486 with little memory easily outperformed a pentium with lots of memory running Windows NT. There is nothing we can do about that, though. The largest files took just over a minute to load.
We have kept pretty close to our design so far. The only changes we have made were in two spots were we were planning to send back a value, but instead we are passing back an object so that we can pass back a null value when applicable. We have also explored some more aspects of Java and have determines that things such as printing and saving brush information will be trivial additions to the program. The only coding problem we have run into with Java is that it is pass by reference rather than pass by value, which our design assumed. We think we have found a simple way around this, but have not implemented it yet. The source files we have so far are here. Compiling instructions are located in that directory.
We met once this week to get a feeling for what we have so far and plan what we are going to do this term. We have decided that we are going to have a formal code review for each class we

Questions:

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