Yes, I have to face the truth. In April I will become 26 years old and that was reason enough to get some mail from the family benefits office (Familienkasse). Unfortunately they told me that I will no longer receive child allowance after March. Fortunately I served my time (9 month) at the German Bundeswehr directly after finishing school. This means that I will get money until 2009.
Nevertheless I wasted nearly one year, doing absolutely nothing for completing my degree in computer sciences. Instead I was wasting time getting drunk, trying to play guitar or doing other senseless stuff. But as you have probably reasoned after reading my last posting (Rambo), I belong to the working part of society by now. Yes, I sold my soul to ATB Bremen, an «Institute for Applied Systems Technology». Like the other students there I was mainly engaged to code for food money.
Reviewing the last 4 weeks at ATB I have to say, that I am still satisfied with what I am doing yet. We will see what happens in the near future, as I only have a contract for 3 months (my probation period). Recently I had to convert an old database (containing millions of rows in about 40 tables). Therefore I designed a new database schema which finally uses neat things like foreign keys. How can you even build a database without foreign keys. Even if it not really supports it, like when using MyISAM (the default MySQL) tables, which are not capable of using foreign keys. If you don’t have the possibility to activate InnoDB tables, you should at least use numeric Ids and JOINS to combine referencing tables to avoid redundancy. What so ever.
Documenting Java code
Surprisingly I enjoyed coding this stuff and more important: even after work I wasn’t that annoyed of programming all day. That is why I suddenly restarted working at my diploma thesis. Unfortunately I did not made enormous progress within the last few days. Instead I had to read through my (three month) old source code, trying to understand what I did some time ago. Therefore I decided to clean up the code and refactor inappropriate names, packages and so forth. Moreover I started to document all my existing source code, using JavaDoc.
At first I did not really remember how to write doc comments, but fortunately most of the Java classes and interfaces are well documented. While editing my own JavaDoc comments, I found a nice view provided by Eclipse. It is called «Javadoc» (what a surprise) and shows a preview of the documentation for the currently selected element.
SuppressWarnings
If you are a Java developer like me you probably find some warnings that eclipse points out annoying. Fortunately you can suppress this warnings for methods, classes or simple lines of code by using the @SupressWarnings
annotation. Maybe you have wondered like I did, what values for this annotation can be specified. The answer is: it is compiler dependent. But if you are using Eclipse, you can use one of the following values, documented in the Eclipse SDK help (at the bottom):
- all
- to suppress all warnings
- boxing
- to suppress warnings relative to boxing/unboxing operations
- cast
- to suppress warnings relative to cast operations
- dep-ann
- to suppress warnings relative to deprecated annotation
- deprecation
- to suppress warnings relative to deprecation
- fallthrough
- to suppress warnings relative to missing breaks in switch statements
- finally
- to suppress warnings relative to finally block that donââ¬â¢t return
- hiding
- to suppress warnings relative to locals that hide variable
- incomplete-switch
- to suppress warnings relative to missing entries in a switch statement (enum case)
- nls
- to suppress warnings relative to non-nls string literals
- null
- to suppress warnings relative to null analysis
- restriction
- to suppress warnings relative to usage of discouraged or forbidden references
- serial
- to suppress warnings relative to missing serialVersionUID field for a serializable class
- static-access
- to suppress warnings relative to incorrect static access
- synthetic-access
- to suppress warnings relative to unoptimized access from inner classes
- unchecked
- to suppress warnings relative to unchecked operations
- unqualified-field-access
- to suppress warnings relative to field access unqualified
- unused
- to suppress warnings relative to unused code
…haben eigentlich ALLE das ganze Jahr rumgedödelt statt endlich mal die Diplomarbeit fertig zu machen? Das kann doch nicht wahr sein! 🙂
F(Quote)
Klingons don’t document their code ^^‘
Yeah yeah, code readability is something often disregarded by the programming folks but has an enormous importance over good coding.
Bah, damn it, don’t remind me of my thesis…
ziplies(Quote)