11.WebSpider

This was a difficult assignment. One problem that I had was that there was no given expected output based on the input ("http://hackystat.org") that we all had to use. Because of that, I could not determine if I was doing the assignment correctly and had to rely on the group message board to determine if I was getting something close to what other people were getting. In the end, my total number of links did not exactly match what other people were getting, but it was relatively close.

Although the assignment was difficult, I felt that I was able to learn from it. This assignment required me to get much more familiar with ant and all the other various tools we use to build our code. For example, I was forced to modify the build.xml file because I could not get JUnit to work because the build.xml file was missing the JUnit jar file. I also realized just how annoying PMD and CheckStyle can be at times, particularly PMD. At the same time, however, I also learned to appreciate how PMD and CheckStyle keep your code easy to read by keeping your coding style consistent.

Luckily, I was able to complete the first three tasks and my code can be downloaded from the following link:

Download My WebSpider