Release 0.1 AKA anxiety attacks every 0.5 second

 

WHAT A WEEK! This week was a rough one for your boy. 

I am the type of person who looks forward to new challenges.

Someone who enjoys spending time and learning about new things.

Someone who gets some sort of euphoria when something is completed.

BUT OMG! This week had me banging my head on my desk my anxiety levels through the roof.

I say this because this week we were tasked with completing our very first OSD600 release.

Release 0.1:

This annoying little program was to be a CLI tool to check for broken links on a specified URL or a local html file.

Naturally, when starting these types of projects I think to myself. What would be the best approach to do this with as little effort and least time consumed.

BUT, since this is Open Source Development, I wanted, NAY!, I had to be unique from all the python and JavaScript plebs coders. So, what did I choose... Java with the Selenium framework.

OK. Perfect I knew what I was going to do.

Time to start.

Starting was the easy step. Reading up on Selenium and how to use the chrome web driver was not so easy.

At this point there was a lot of this...

When I finally had an understanding of what I needed to do and how to implement the code I ran into an issue with the chromedriver.exe which quickly turned from (look above) to...

After talking to my professor (and me having my IDE open for the whole day) about why it was not working he pointed me in the right direction. 

The issue was solved but the terminal on my IDE had to restarted in order for the environment variables to take effect. Easy fix. Restart Intellij. HORRAH! It worked.

Anyways, this is the ending result for my 0.1 release which bares the creative name of "Dead Linkage".

Getting started:

There are a couple requirement in order to get the tool setup and ready to go.

• Download Chrome browser
• Download chromedriver.exe
• Make sure you have Java installed on your machine
• Download "Dead Linkage" jar file
• Make sure you have an up-to-date terminal which supports ANSI escape characters such as "Windows Terminal"

Excellent onto the usages.

First thing you want to do is open the windows terminal and navigate (using cd) to where you saved the jar file.

Once inside the directory you can run the tool using the following commands:

    Displays the HELP MENU

    

    Displays the Version of the tool

    Runs the tool with a specified URL

    Runs the tool with a specified .html file in the same directory as the jar file

The tool was really interesting to make. The most interesting part was getting the optional features up and running. For my optional features I chose to clearly have color output such as green for the "Good" link, red for "Bad" links, and white (because gray is not supported) for "Unknown" links.

Anyways this was fun and all but ALOT of stress was induced until everything worked as intended.

Till later,

XOXO,

Gossip Plamen