Today was hand-in day for the first part of this module’s coursework – to design a shop, based on four requirements, using Object-Oriented design principles. Specifically, we had to use the State, Strategy and Item Description patterns, although I also worked in a couple of other patterns I like – Decorator (solves problems of composing functionality using recursion) and Iterator (hides implementation details of collections behind a simple object you can only iterate over).
I quite enjoyed having a simple pet problem like this, with a real reason to work through some aspects of it. If you’re interested in having a go yourself, the assignment reminded me of the first pragprog Code Kata – Supermarket Pricing.
As a result of the coursework, I’ve found a UML tool I can live with – Visual Paradigm. I’ll probably do a bit of a review and compare with the other tools I tried soon, but suffice to say it was by some margin the most pleasant and easy-to-use tool of the 5 or 6 I tried. £40 needed to get rid of the invasive watermark, but it looks like when it comes to CASE tools you get what you pay for.
The lectures are proving tricky to keep on top of – the pace is kinda slow (maybe that’s just me), so I find myself struggling to maintain attention. Still, the lecture notes are very detailed, so I spent a a few hours reviewing last week’s notes creating myself some revision material. I’ve been using a piece of software called Freemind to do ‘mind-mapping’, something I found out about in a presentation by Steve Brett in last years’ unsheffield unconference. It seems to work pretty well for the way I do revision, here’s a screenshot if you’ve not seen a mind map before.
So anyway, it’s all good. Coursework part 2 starts now, two more lectures in this module.
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