New Build System
ML has spent the last 2 weeks re-writing the Ant build script for Kowari. It had been getting messy and difficult to modify, but it also occasionally missed some dependencies, meaning that we had to do clean builds most of the time. A full clean build took about 5 minutes on my system, so this was very wasteful.

ML's work was checked in on Thursday, so today I pulled in the new scripts, and started work on the NodeType resolver scripts to make sure everything was integrated. Unfortunately this took quite some time, and it wasn't until after lunch that I could compile again. Then ML told me that he needed a new method on ResolverSession, so I had to track down all of the implementing classes again in order to add the method.

I was starting to run my first tests by the end of the day, but hit a couple of initial hurdles. Initially the system would not recognise my model type. I had accidentally changed the type's URI, but this was not the issue. I realised that Kowari had not picked up my resolver factory, and so I spent a little time trying to remember how the factory was supposed to get registered. SR reminded me that this is done in the conf/kowari-config.xml file.

The next problem was that the newResolver() method was being called with a true value in the canWrite parameter. I was under the impression that this meant that the object was not going to be treated as read-only, so I was throwing an exception. SR explained that this was not the case, and that it was more like a hint for the system. If I really wanted to be read-only then I should just throw exceptions from any modifying methods. I'm already doing this, so I'm covered. In the meantime, I just have to remove the check on the canWrite parameter in order to proceed.