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CST 338 - Week 6

Dueling cards? Who ever knew that would be the assignment for this week's class? I guess the professor and TA did, because that's what our group worked on this week.

Our program this week was largely an extension on the card game we did last week, although this time with more rules. In addition, we also did major restructuring of our backend code by following the Model-View-Controller architecture.

Model-View-Controller, or MVC for short, describes an architectural pattern where a program is divided into three independent, yet directly related subunits: the model contains data structures, variables, and the fundamental internal logic of the program, the controller takes user input and communicates with the model to manipulate internal data, and finally, the "view" provides a graphical display of the program to the user, and updates this display accordingly. 

Our team found the assignment challenging just like last week, and the most difficult part was getting the computer's AI working correctly, but we didn't find it as labor intensive as last week because we already had most of the groundwork done from the first version of our card game. Overall, it was a fun assignment.

UML Diagrams
I work in software test for a large government contractor. I don't deal directly with code myself at the office, but I am pretty close to certain software developers, especially the folks in the embedded software department, and I have seen numerous UML diagrams in their software design description and interface design description documents. I have also seen UML-style diagrams for non-software related items such as hardware systems overview diagrams. They are usually smaller and more abstract than the ones we make for this class, but it seems as if there are many more of them around.

Multithreading
Multithreading is something I've always been curious about in terms of how it works, but it's never something I have learned or done personally until now. Even though the use of multithreading in our program was quite simple compared to some other programs, it gave me better insight into how it works. In my old data structures class, I did have to implement some sort of job scheduling queue that ran in a loop, and I found that assignment very difficult. If I had known about how to utilize multithreading in Java back then, it probably would've made writing that program a lot easier.

Patterns
Patterns are useful for getting a rough idea on how to structure a program, as long as you avoid falling into the trap of following them too closely to the point where it restricts creativity and flow in your program. Personally, I believe the best design patterns are structured enough to make code easy to understand and consistent while allowing for flexibility. 


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