11.WebSpider

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Summary
At first glance, this seemed like a rather simple program. Once I began working, however, that perception changed. Despite the setbacks, I accomplished all 3 tasks. I did not attempt the extra credit.

Task 1:
The importance of program design and planning was very important in this stage. The later tasks would rely heavily on how this task was implemented. As such, I spent quite a lot of time trying to come up with a good design. Despite my efforts, however, my design was not able to smoothly incorporate the required features for Tasks 2 and 3.

Task 2:
I completely redesigned my program from Task 1. I added a new class and a TreeMap to hold the required information about the most popular link. It became clear during these tasks that emma and coverage driven testing are quite uselss. Even with nearly 100% coverage, very few errors were found and much time was wasted trying to get the coverage to 100%. In the future I will focus more on writing "good" unit tests rather then very specific ones that get more coverage.

Task 3:
The logger system was very easy to use. I only had to add a few lines of code and it was working fine. The only problem I had was getting the javac compiler to recognize the Hackystat logger. I was only able to test it in eclipse. Please note that the .jar file contains a version with the logger commented out. To test the logger, please recompile the source.

Conclusions
Good tests can be very helpful, but bad ones can be a waste of time. The amount of time I wasted on emma would have been must better used writing more effective tests. Next time I plan on spending less time with emma and more time with just junit.