Open-source development: DueDates-Red

As of now, I am working on a program project called DueDates with a partner. The program supposes to display books that are checked out from the Hawaii State Public Library Systems and the University of Hawaii Library Systems with the user’s library number and password.

The program uses a webpage scraping technology with the help of HTTPUnit (HttpUnit emulates the relevant portions of browser behavior, including form submission, JavaScript, basic http authentication, cookies and automatic page redirection, and allows Java test code to examine returned pages either as text, an XML DOM, or containers of forms, tables, and links. From http://httpunit.sourceforge.net/)


From the beginning of the project, our professor, Dr. Philip Johnson, tells us not to slack. He was correct to not procrastinate, because there are many parts to this project. My partner, C. Okada, and I was able to get the program to get information from the Hawaii Public Library and UH Library.

One of the problems I came across was my UH Library account does not have anything checked out. I also did not have any blocks (books on hold, etc.) for that account. So I called F. Allen, who was in charge of the UH Online Library systems, if he had some accounts I could use for testing purposes. So yes, he lends me some library accounts that they use for testing. So I was able to complete my part of the part in looking up the correct table to display.

In order to keep in touch with my partner, we arraigned meetings at Zippy’s Restaurant for 30 minutes – I am able to order something to eat while I was there. The in the person meetings were great, we were able to talk about the problems we are encountering, and enhancements we need to put in before the release date. The only problem meeting at Zippy’s is that there is no wireless connection for us to connect to our Google code hosting main page. We might have to change the meeting place to McDonald’s or UH’s Hamilton Library.


A thing that I found out is that it can be a hassle if group members do not meet in person, because you cannot really “talk” if talking through online messaging. Another thing is that Google Hosting is perfect for novices like me in learning about open source development and working on a project with group members.

Link to DueDates-Red’s Google Host Project Main Page: http://code.google.com/p/duedates-red/