CST 338 Week 6

Week 6

This week has been difficult, but I think my team pulled through just fine. We worked on implementing our project in an MVC pattern and used multithreading to display a timer on the screen. I'm happy with how it turned out. This was our last group project of the course. It's been fun to work with a group again, but I'll admit that I am glad to go back to being a little hermit with my assignments again for a bit. The pressure of getting a good grade for myself and my team is too much.

Because our next class already opened up on the website, I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed trying to also get prepared for that and wrap up this course. I am hoping that I will get through the next couple of weeks without a problem. October is very busy for me socially and it definitely impacts the time I can spend on my academics.

Specific Prompts

What experience do you have with UML diagrams?

I had some experience with UML diagrams, but not for designing programs and class structures. I've primarily used them for databases at work and in some of my recent courses.

Are they used at your workplace? Have you done multithreading in any language before?

UML diagrams are known of at my workplace and occasionally used for database schemas, but not preferred. After several years of producing them, my company found that clients didn't care about them and the developers never referenced them. They found them to be unuseful.

I have used multithreading before at work (in Java, too!) and it has been fine. I've never really had to think about how it was all working. We typically use other libraries and packages that do most of the most difficult things for us. Also, we tend to use them for background processes that aren't so obvious. The most recent thing I can think of is pulling data from endpoints while the application is running and placing it in the cache it for the user to see. It makes the application appear much faster than it actually is.

Did you find Patterns to be helpful?

Yes. I really like patterns in general. They help keep everything in a nice, defined place. Otherwise, the programs can get very out of control. I will say, however, that there's a big difference from the MVC pattern we implemented in this course and what I have seen used in the real world. I think it's the difference between the old style and the new. In the pattern we learned in class, the view does not interact with the controller at all. The one I know in practice has the controller handle everything and the view and the model does not interact with one another.