QA Consulting – Personal Blog #4

It’s time for the fortnightly roundup of what I’ve been up to during my training contract at QA Consulting in mostly wet and dark Salford Quays, Manchester!

So we started looking into Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE or JEE) which contains a variety of different packages on-top of the standard edition, such as unit tests for test driven development (TDD) and server based interaction heavily integrated systems.

We were allocated into small groups of four members per team and tasked with creating the database and front-end systems for both the staff’s inventory management system and the website the user would interact with as a visitor or account holder.  We started on ERD diagrams and planned out our database structure and relationships to other tables. While this worked well for a pure database design, it did not interact with Java Server Faces (JSF) in the way we anticipated and as such we had to change the design to follow object oriented design better.

We then began writing the code that would interface with the database; however we did not make the databases so it was unintuitive to write as we did not know if the code was working or even close to relevant. We managed to create what we believe is a working structure, although time will tell how successful it is.

The following week we then started developing the front-end for both the website, which was mainly copied over from one of our team members’ code from previous weeks, we also designed and created wireframes for our front-end designed for the inventory manager to manage stock and change products.

We then took these and implemented them in HTML, CSS and JavaScript, making working versions of each. Then the HTML was tediously converted to XHTML, a far stricter language which also doesn’t use many useful features that HTML5 implements.  So after rejigging this and generally fixing the 1001 errors using all this causes, we now have a working server that loads a template which contains content within it, the content is dynamically loaded by different xhtml files and loads CSS and JavaScript dynamically.

The team works well and we generally complete our targets well before latest deadlines. Next week it will be interesting if we can hook up the database and get everything actually interfacing correctly. Then I think I will be able understand JSF and the entire process clearly.

This will be my last personal blog but a final technical post will be published sometime next week. Thanks for reading if you’ve got this far, I’m not really sure why because this content isn’t interesting to read in the slightest.