One week and one day after the evaluation, I am trying to recall what we have went through in the Project SEMF.
The project had a very bad start. And we choose that project very accidentally. I can still remember the days we were finding projects. I preferred to a memory check tool for c/c++ programs which somewhat looks awful at the first place. And lot of attempts to do a project related to Web Services. And finally we came in to this idea proposed by me.
The flow of the project was simple. In the first semester We finish only little on Schema Designer. The Implementation we did is obviously the bad one that can be done by anyone. So at the end of the first semester we were in risk we may not implement anything at all at all.
In the next semister I personally Dig in to the Page Designer. There are some parts in there I planned to finish in 2/3 days, but actually took 2 months. So it is obvious that it is just a miracle that we can came across everything. And by the start of the April we had good view on the page designer. I created that toolbar at the first week of the April holiday which went unchanged until the last week or so. Within the April vacation I planned to finish the compiler. But the cricket world cup made me not to be much away from the TV. But I managed to write the tokenizer and simple parser on those days. We(Sri Lanka) loose the world cup. I remember how I feel the next morning after the world cup final. We were not even close to an end. That week was special. I work hard Sunday, Monday, Wednesday. The most of the unorganized code in the semantic handler is written in that period. And Thursday I came to the university hostel to work for the algorithm exam which was to be held on Saturday. The very first night a thief broke in to my room and stole all the money from my purse. I saw him at the last min, but i did never catch him. He jumped in to the roof and run while I manage to scream "Thief, Thief" (Actually in my mother tung). Isn't it funny.
In next few weeks as university start I managed to write some codes like components for uploader, HTMLText using TinyMCE and the media library. So at the end of the month May we had page designer complete, but with bugs. And the big thing I managed to do in those days as far as I believe is designing the Databinding framework. I managed to have some working samples.
In the June we had exams. And that when Dilan started working on the Schema Designer. I think he did a pretty good job using the same back=end i wrote on the last semester powered by a great front=end.
As exam finished I wrote a simple test framework to make sure we are done everything. That is when we made our project a usable system. I have to do lot of editing to pass all the tests. Then the first day the Juneterm started, i.e. actually start of July on the way from home to univeristy I was thinking about how to implement inheritance in the schema. The same night I created an interface for "User" and made a login system based on the user token. Wow it was working, I think it was the first clue our project is getting OK and we may able to show something at the demonstration. I cant remember what happened in the next 3 weeks. First we wrote the project report. And then prepared for the demo. Dilan and I was sleepless most of the night specially the last 2 nights. The night before the demonstration day I slept only 45 mins. That is starting from 5.45 am to 6.30am. Dilan was also the same practicing the presentation all way night. The feeling I had on that particular day was we have more probability of getting failed. The early day 3 groups were failed at the demos and vivas. And our main demonstration element the final system was only mostly done on that sleepless night.
So at the end of the day we were really happy. Our project really impressed them. That all the hard work that we did went not for nothing.
So what is the future of the SEMF?. We are now working on uploading the code to the Google repos and do a simple release. And I am afraid I will again look in to the project as I moved to some different field in my job which I ll be attending in next month onward. Anyway I m sure SEMF can do something special and SEMF should be continue implementing. And It may need to change some design decision and re-implement.
But It is no doubt that in the first release we are introducing a real different web experience to the world.
Friday, August 3, 2007
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