Had a fantastic long weekend, with plenty of grilling and hanging out with my friends that are here for the summer. I also acquired a bike from one of my local friends, so I got to bike to work today! It was quite nice not having to deal with Duke's summer bus scheduling. I decided that today and tomorrow should be spent learning about all the different studies and other programs related to the Software Visualization field, so I made my way (by year written) through 9 of the paper linked at JFLAP Papers. I took plenty of notes and will throw them up soon.
It was very interesting to read through the progress of the field of Software/Algorithm Visualization from 1996 to 2006. The progress made, especially within pegagogical tools, has been astounding. It is also quite interesting to note that even in its early stages JFLAP was one of the most widely used and useful piece of software of its kind. Only a few more papers and then I can start really working with Julian and Peggy.
Today we had our first Wednesday lunchtime presentation. It was quite interesting to see what sort of work there is on the research side of CS. I also worked my way through the rest of the papers and got set up through Google Code and Eclipse to start looking at (and testing) Julian's new code. Tomorrow will be a meeting, so hopefully I'll be able to start on code ASAP.
Did quite a lot of looking and playing with code today, with both Julian's new 8.0 version as well as the old 7.0 code. Reading through all the classes and seeing how they interrelate is really quite interesting. I must say (no offense to those who previously worked on JFLAP) that Julian's new code/design is a LOT cleaner, and definitely needed. Hopefully by the end of his time here, it will be done and that will be the version I add on to. I also searched all around to learn about CYK parsing and Set Theory, 2 potential topics for my project.
To my surprise, today is the first day of June! We're well into the summer, and I'm definitely moving out of the training phase of this project. Despite the weekend being right around the corner, I had one of the most productive days yet. I started with a little playing around with code, old and new. I started examing the CYK parsing algorithm and learned just what all those lines of code are for. Subsequently, Peggy and I sat down (with small amount of input and guidance from Julian) and decided to start rewriting the entire parser to fit in the new framework! Though we didn't quite get done with tracking/tracing the parser tree, we did complete the algorithm so it will determine membership, without having any of the troubling String representations that caused some previous bugs. With that done, I think the rest of the parser will come to us and (with some input on functionality from Julian and Professor Rodger) we will have a well functioning, speedy parser ready for JFLAP 8.0!