Group Meeting 6

Activities

We presented some of our built functions to our supervisor, including a demo of GUI for Registration page. We also talked about the Question part and Translation part in details. QT’s built in features make it possible for us to add in Chinese translation to this software in a later stage, so possibly we’re still going to release a Chinese version.

Apart from that there’s nothing important to mention as everything’s going on steadily.

Current progress is that on SVN we’re now at revision 36, and…

• Server group is finishing deamon feature and might even going to help with Client group.
• Client group’s bringing features together and writing different drivers to test.

Tasks

1. Both groups are to test network communication locally and over the Internet.
2. Start designing and building GUIs for each class, and perform further tests.

Group Meeting 5

Report for Week 4

Current team meeting time is 3:30pm every Tuesday. However this doesn’t suit everyone so we’re going to move it to Thursday, same time.

We decided to have a demo released by the end of week 4 but there were too many problems to fix and we just couldn’t make it. The current progress is as the following:

• Studying QT skills, learning to build simple GUI, learning to make use of the Slots and Signals (all members)
• Refining existing codes. Eg, built error checking Client classes; built email and password validation system; fixed some known bugs in question generating.
• The server group is working on the Database and building a deamon which takes data sent by clients and store them in the database.

Activities

We mainly discussed about the process of Client-Server communication.

Communication takes place in following situations:

1. Clients register accounts
2. Clients modify profiles
3. Clients upload test results
4. Clients check for updates
5. Clients download weekly reports

So rather than building seperate functions in Client and Server classes, we’re going to build a dedicated class which handles network communication only, and it’s supposed to work for all the above cases

Tasks

Coding!

Especially start building simple QT network modules.

Group Meeting 4

Report for Week 3

For the previous three weeks we’ve been making all kinds of preparations for our projects. As I mentioned in last week’s diary that we met with some problems regarding the QT and IDEs, Jeff managed to figure out a way for implementing QT with Netbeans. I suppose it’s necessary to briefly record the steps here:

1. Install latest MinGW package (Make sure MSYS is there)
2. Install the QT library (SDK also works but it’s just too big…)
3. Set up environment varibles (for step 1 and step2)
4. Install Java SDK
5. Install Netbeans with C++
6. Configure toolset in Netbeans->Settings->C++

In terms of coding progress, the Client group has implemented the prototype for some basic functionalities, including Registration, Log, Question, etc.

Haven’t heard much about the progress of Server group.

Activities

Activities for this week were basically doing the coding. One major discussion was about the implementation of data transfer over network. We all agreed to selet TCP as the underlying protocol, so we took a close look at some of the QT headers relating to network, including

• QHostInfo
• QNetworkAccessManager
• QTCPSocket
• QTCPServer

Slots and Signals are another two important concepts in QT, which are used in GUI implementation as well as network stuff.

Tasks

Coding! (All members)

Looking at QT network headers. (All members)

As we’re falling behind compared to other teams, I think we need to catch up with them as fast as possible.

Group Meeting 3

Statements

The reason why we employ QT in our project is more than GUI design itself.

We were introduced to Threads implementation and Network stuff in CSCI212, and all that we learned and built was under POSIX standard, on Linux platform. However, these technologies don’t seem to be supported on Windows, and that’s why QT is useful in this situation. We can benefit from the powerful support from QT, and it also makes it possible for us to release Linux version of our project in the future (if we want to…).

Report for Week 2

We spent quite many efforts implementing QT with VS, but some problem exists. For example, VS don’t recognize the QT libraries so everytime you include a QHeader you always see a read line indicating “error”. As it doesn’t affect compiling, it’s becoming difficult to tell the real errors and fake “errors”.

Activities

In this week’s meeting we basically talked about some technical problems regarding the QT environment and IDE in details, and tried to solve those problems. Also I got feedbacks from Allen and Henry that QT is easy to start, but not so easy to really write a real GUI. Considering all the problems with QT and VS, as well as the facts that they’re still waiting a configured IDE with QT, we decided to move from VS to Netbeans for all our members. This will certainly make us slow in the progress, but it’s the best choice so far.

Tasks

Coding!

All members should start coding from this week, based on the ideas we sketched in the preliminary technical documentation.

Jeff and Drake (me) will continue to seek a way to implement QT with Netbeans.

Group Meeting 2

Report for Week 1

Last week we got our hands on the SVN and started learning it. While it’s a powerful tool for us to use, we did meet with some difficulties, especially when dealing with deleting folders, file inclusion / exclusion.

Activities

So in order to better solve the problems, I added two links to our website, which are directed to the TortoiseSVN documentation page----one in Chinese and one in English.  Everyone can go there and refer to those information when he has any problem dealing with SVN.

Another thing we did in this week’s meeting was that we took a look at the QT official website, and set up the QT environment together with Visual Studio 2010 (the VS part was actually done in last week).  We tested a sample application and it worked fine.

However, the problem is that the steps we did only worked for Visual Studio, and for some of our members who use other IDEs, such as Netbeans, it simply doesn’t work. So we need to figure out another way to set up the QT environment with Netbeans, which seems to be a non-trivial step.

At the same time we divided our team into Client part and Server part, each with two members. Drake (me) and Allen form the Client group and Jeff and Henry form the Server group.

Tasks

Client:

Drake (me):to set up the QT environment with Visual Studio at own computer. Read the Technical Manual again to get ready before coding.

Allen: wait for instructions for how to set up QT with Netbeans; start looking at the QT stuff, get a brief concept of the QT GUI.

Server:

Jeff: to figure out a way to implement QT with Netbeans. Read the Technical Manual again to get ready before coding.

Henry: wait for instructions for how to set up QT with Netbeans; start looking at the QT stuff, get a brief concept of the QT GUI.

Group Meeting 1

Introduction

The following is the activities in Week 1.

In the meeting Jeff introduced the Subversion and recommended the TortoiseSVN as our choice of the client on Windows. We set up our SVN repository at https://subversion.assembla.com/svn/csci321dtp/, and the TortoiseSVN environment for the two lab computers.

Jeff and I (Drake) successfully created accounts and got access to our SVN space. Henry and Allen finished this later.

Tasks

Tasks for week 1 is simple.

We were introduced to SVN in the meeting, but there’s more to learn about SVN. So the task for EVERYONE, is to:

• Get familiar with the TortoiseSVN client,
• Set up the TortoiseSVN environment at own PCs
• Try some Commit / Update actions.

And we’ll talk about our progress next week.