[castor-dev] [GSoC] Face-to-Face Meeting with Mentor(Ralf). Progress Update !!

[Ahmad Hassan]

Hi EveryOne,

Just to share the progress of GSoC project. I and my Mentor (Ralf) had first
face to face meeting on 30th April and 1st May 2009. The brief overview of
the meeting is explicated below:
Agenda



The agenda of the meeting was

· For me(student), to get to know more about the Mentor in person

· For mentor, to get to know more about the student in person

· To get familiarise with the castor code base in bit detail

· Have closer look at the code base

· How the release system works in Codehaus

· How to register issue on JIRA before addressing the issue

· How to prepare patch and check-in into the repository

· Define clear Milestones and task distribution

· Discuss Schedule of the tasks in particular and schedule of the
project in general
Summary of the Meeting



On 30th April 2009, I and my mentor had 5 hours meeting in which we started
to look into the code base together. The main focus was to understand how
the castor flow control works. My mentor run the Junit test cases of the
castor code base and explicated what castor does upon call to different
methods or objects. We mainly focussed on the persistence part. He explained
me how the Remove and update classes work in persistence scenario. I got an
idea about the functionality of these classes in a wider context. This was
necessary in the sense that I have to refactor these modules and have to
play with this whole code.

On 1st April 2009, we had 5 hours meeting again. On that day we focussed on
insert and select module of the persistence part of the castor. In fact the
refactoring of insert and select modules are the toughest part of this
project because of diversity of the modules. We have decided to approach
Remove and Update modules first and after that we will get into the insert
and select modules refactoring. We have refined and modified the approach
which I submitted in the proposal of this project. Initially I thought that
I will implement the sql engine first and then refactor the whole codebase
to adapt it to new implementation. But this approach would not be that much
effective because of the high complexity of the code base. So we decided to
approach the problem in a different way. Now we will refactor the code base
from the start and write new implementation at the same time.
Schedule of Deliverables



Until Mid Term evaluation, we planned to finish the Remove and Update
modules refactoring and if possible then we might touch the select or insert
module little bit. Then after finishing the update and remove modules we
will jump into the select or insert module.