My Lab 5 is finally done. Apparently I’m the last one to be getting it passed off. I guess that’s what happens when you have deadlines at work, a thesis proposal, a family…

I really enjoyed Lab 5. It took far longer than it should have for me but that was due mostly to playing around with all the cool GUI features of NetBeans 6. I really like the support in NetBeans for running background tasks. It’s a really powerful framework. And the GUI designer in NetBeans is, of course, second-to-none.

Building the WHOIS web-service was trivial. NetBeans did all the work.

Interacting the Amazon’s SQS service was a bit challenging though. I’m using the Typica library from Google Code. It sucks. I was originally using version 0.8 which insisted on using Base64 to decode SQS messages. Fortunately version 0.9 came out not too long ago and that version seams to work well. It still tries to Base64 decode SQS messages by default, but fortunately you can turn it off. Typica has a number of dependencies from Apache Commons and other places that it doesn’t seam to document at all.

Typica has potential I think but it’s certainly not there yet. I should follow Amazon Jeff’s advice and go do a write up about it at the AWS web site.

Other than that, this class was fun. I can’t say that I learned that much new about distributed systems but playing with EC2 was a lot of fun and made the class worth it.