A Long weekend

I spent most of the weekend trying to integrate the different parts our group has been working on into a single program. I ran into various problems: Objective-c does not have good static program analysis, and since the machines at school do not have the debug function enabled, I had to go trough trying to figure out what was causing the program to crash. There were some errors caused by trying to cast from one type to another, and other errors caused by trying to call methods that do not exist. Small typos would cause the program to compile but fail at run time.

Our group did manage to get the pieces put together. We will be working on sending the order to the server next.

UI Update

Here is a quick update on the UI --

Selecting a table in edit mode brings up a UIPickerView:



Selecting a Patron in edit mode brings up a window to change the text:

iOrder interface

I started looking into some of the components of the user interface for the application. I played around with the interface builder and found it to be non-intuitive and difficult to use. I looked trough the iPhone SDK documentation, and found how to implement the user interface without the xib files. I found this approach to be easier to implement.

I updated the source files in kiln with the new UI implementation. The different tabs can now be selected, tables can be added and edited. The program looks almost identical to the mock-up.

iOrder communication

Group 4 has made some progress in our application. We were able to add the server client code to the application. I created a small wrapper for the c sockets that allows creating and using sockets without having to know much about them. Creating a server is as easy as saying createServer( port ) and for the client createClient ( ip, port ). Communication is done via the methods send ( string ) and recieve ( string ).

I did run into some trouble making the server application multi-threaded. Parameters can't be passed directly to the methods in C. I had to use a struct to pass the parameters around... if we run into problems later, i think switching the server over to java would be the best choice.

I have been uploading my source changes into mercurial. I don't like the interface very much (command line). It would have been nice to have the built in support that xcode has for subversion.