Final days of internship

Internship diaries #5

It’s the end of the internship experience and I feel lucky to have such a wonderful time at WSO2. I learned a lot on open-source technologies, middleware and their applications, ethics on JavaScript libraries, web services and most of all, problem solving, which had been contributing to the increase of my StackOverflow reputation as well.

As for extra-curricular activities, I learnt a lot about Table Tennis, Foosball and Carom and I even participated in the Tea-time championship as a part of Titans. The Secret Santa was one of the most exciting memories which include lunch outings and ice-cream outings.

As for the Data Mapper, the main work done during this phase was adding the format conversion functions.

Since the tree generation and the backend functionality was dealt with a JSON schema as the data, the data selected by the user had to be converted to JSON schema as well. The simplest was JSON to JSON schema, which was achieved by iterating over the keys and values in the JSON object to generate a matching JSON schema.

The CSV to schema conversion was achieved using an external library called mr-data-converter which converts CSV data to JSON which will be again converted to JSON schema by my previously written code.

XML and XSD conversion was the troublesome work since I was unable to find external opensource libraries with compatible licenses to use in the app. Most of the available libraries work with Node.js which again rules out the context of the app because the Data Mapper is supposed to be run in a static environment.

I achieved XML conversion using the HTML parsing functions and used its native methods to traverse through the XML. An interesting concept I came across during this conversion was the use of attributes in XML. And I had to come up with a key attributes to define the attributes in an XML content. For example,

<name id="345"> myName </name>

will be converted to:

name: {
        type: "string",
        attributes: {
                      id: {
                            type: "string"
                          }
                     }
      }

XSD conversion too had its own troubles with its namespaces and type definitions. XSD was a whole new topic for me and I learnt quite a lot about the tag names and their usages. During the conversion, I used a function where the first iteration would save the definitions and determine the root element, and a second iteration would traverse the root and build the schema.

Once the conversion was completed, I tested the functionality using SalesForce sample files which gave satisfactory results.

After taking the Data Mapper to a halt, I started looking into web services, especially RESTful web services. I was assigned with a task to develop a use case by incorporating a web service using JAX-RS and WSO2 products such as ESB, DSS and API manager. Currently I have worked around DSS to bind to a MySQL database, a web service to read information and I'm still working on connecting them using the ESB.

This internship experience has been such a wonderful time in my life. I learnt a lot on coding and working ethics, I improved my soft skills, especially on communication criteria, I got to meet some interesting people, share the knowledge as well as some good laughs. But all good things must come to an end. Only God knows what might be waiting for me in the coming new year, and I believe that the goodness will keep coming in. Thank you and Good Bye WSO2.