Computer development platform Part 2

Last month I started working on a model development aspect of a project. And I figured I'd take the time to learn the use of a new toolkit for programming. An update.

I had a project meeting yesterday that went very well. The approach was sound. The work on the model that I've done already has uncovered issues that have not been addressed by prior work, and this is going to lead to major policy recommendations. All the things that a model developer hopes will happen.

In addition, discussion uncovered some details in the system being modeled that I did not realize (helps when multiple heads get together to tease details out). And we are talking deployment when all is said and done. So, I have a few issues:

1. The business logic of the model needs to be modified to handle my improved understanding of the process.
2. A number of additional scenarios need to be considered, preferably without breaking anything else.
3. The whole thing needs to be deployable. And that usually means MS Excel, a Visual Basic application, or Java (because these are things that can be sent to any computer without much trouble)

Number 3 leads to an additional complication. I've been developing the whole thing in Python, using Eclipse. I'm going to decide that for deployment, I will convert the whole thing to Jython, since that makes it deployable on a Java Virtual Machine (and everyone has Java installed). But Python is at version 2.5, while Jython is at version 2.2, so it is a couple years behind.

Well, this whole thing just screams out, unit testing. As it turns out, I've separated the building block objects from the business logic portions and the database access, which makes the whole thing easier. So, I build my test suite in PyUnit that takes the specifications and builds the model. Then the fun starts.

1. I was still working on the business logic that allocates resources. It was messy, but it did provide output. So I wrote test cases that tested discrete stages along the way and rewrote the logic into smaller functions.
2. Converting to Jython broke some functions, because newer versions of Python had some features that were not in Jython (some forms of introspection). So, I had to rewrite these so they worked under the older language specification, without breaking my test cases.
3. Next on the list, write test cases that implement some of the newly described scenarios, and make them work.

Some of this involved serious work. In particular, rewriting the code to version 2.2 vs. 2.5. Right before I did this, I did a commit to version control (Subversion) just in case I completely messed up. The IDE also helps alot since it takes care of version control, checking Python and Jython, and running the unit tests.

A very productive day. I almost think that I'm getting the hang of this programming stuff.