MyISERN-Onyx-2.0 Review

Our team will perform this review as a team. Therefore, I decided to review team Onyx's project based on the three prime directives and finally give some comments on there web layout and design, as I think that this will help team onyx the most for the final assignment.

An external user can successfully install and use the system
The installation went smooth, but I could not verify the system with the verify target, therefore I strongly recommend team Onyx to fix the pmd errors. Also, I went to the installation guide, which seems to be pretty neat. One note on the installation guide. It tells the user the username and password for the web application, however I believe that the user must change the tomcat-users.xml file in the conf directory of the tomcat system, to fit the distributed username and password. The installation guide says that the server is running locally on the user's computer, which is right. One comment, which might be a little bit confusing. The web application for MyISERN-2.0 is enhanced with the derby database which is also running locally on the user's computer. Therefore, at this point of time it might also be a good idea to tell the user to install Derby onto there system. Otherwise, they won't be able to use the web application fully. Of course, only if a an external database is not yet set up.

The system successfully accomplishes a useful task
The log in with the provided username and password was good. But when I pressed the login button without any username and password, the system crashed. The add, edit, and list Researchers woks fine. The add Organization does not insert multiple items. Therefore, team onyx should still work on that. Because of this fault the edit and display works only partially. It was also possible for me to insert a collaboration with only a name and all other fields blank, but when I tried to edit it it gave me this error: Collaboration field blank (not very useful) and the display collaboration function displays only two fields. The name and the description.

An external developer can successfully understand and enhance the systemThe developers guide is satisfactory, but I would recommend to include the information on how to download httpUnit for testing the web application. We have used it through out the semester and it is critical to our project. One more thing, we also have used jaxb and it might be helpful for the developer to know how to install that tool too. Especially, when the developer wants to perform export data into XML files, which should be one of the option.

Summary
Overall, the system satisfies the three prime directives only partially for reasons mentioned above. As for the web application itself, the formatting flows seem to be equally on FF and IE. All the fonts seem to be too large. The drop down is nice, but not formatted correctly. The side navigation is good but I did not use it at all because of the drop down. There, it is better to decide between a drop down or a side navigation, but not both. The Welcome message is way too large. It takes almost all of the screen real estate away. Talking about screen real estate, the window have to be fully open at all times. Finally, when I tried to login without a username and password using IE it did not crash for some reason.