This is the final project for my CIS-181 Java III course at Kirkwood Community College. Below is a journal of all the things I learned throughout the class.
Project instructions: How to get it installed and running (TO BE FILLED OUT LATER)
I found learning how to use Tomcat really satisfying. I didn't really know anything about software development before enrolling in this program. The way the last semester was explained to me was that it would focus on creating servers. So, I have been really excited to see how that software is created. It was motivating to have that on the first day. Learning about deploying on the major cloud sites like AWS and Azure was also really interesting. Dev opps is really interesting and seems like a valuable skill.
In chapter 3, we learned about Servlets for Java. It was interesting to learn how to create Servlets with Intellij and how it creates the file for us with Java EE. I knew a little about requests and responses, and it was interesting to see how to access the information on the HTML page using methods like “getParameter”. It was also interesting to learn how to read the url to understand what is being passed to the Sevlet. Learning about the “@WebServlet” annotation was also useful for setting a url path or many of them.
In chapter 4, we learned more about Java server pages. It was interesting to see how to create a Model-View-Control framework in Java and handle HTTP Get and Post Requests and route to the appropriate view. It was also interest to earn about server side validation on top of client side validation. I did not know that a HTML could be manipulated in such a way to remove validation on the client side. So while still being important, client side validation is not reliable for controlling the data received from users. Finally, I found learning how to use Twilio very interesting. I learned how to set up voice and sms messaging which I think is very useful.
For this chapter, we learned about HTTP sessions. Sessions are how web apps are able to associate a request to a specific browser to track data. I found it interesting how to track data using sessions as a kind of work around the fact that HTTP is stateless. Passing back his information between the client and the server by setting it in a key value session dictionary conceptually makes sense. It is interesting to see how it is implemented.
I didn’t know a lot about sessions before so it was helpful to see how a browser tracks that. I use developer tools often in Chrome but haven't explored it fully.
Chapter 6 was about Expression Language in JSPs. It is a nice convenience feature for the language and seems cleaner than scriplets. I think it also doesn’t abstract away what is going on so much that it makes it hard to understand. I don’t have much of a problem with scriptlets because I find them easy to follow because it is very explicit about what the code is doing on the JSP page. It is nice to have some diversity of choice and know about the options so that I would be prepared to work with a front-end developer or company that has a style rule where they prefer one over the other.