EVALUATION

Evaluating the contributions of this submission was impeded by the 
missing parts. Every thing I tried while running the program produced 
a null pointer exception, and there seemed to be no progress at all on 
rendering the timeline. In my judgment the one contribution this 
submission has made for the project as a whole is the experimentation 
with XStream, which should be strongly considered in future phases. On 
specifics:


Data modeling and other architecture: The write-up claims that the 
submission has a "solid back-end", though that is very hard to 
substantiate. The event and timeline classes are mainly collections of 
getter and setter methods. There appears to have been little thought 
in the details of representing the data---for example, dates are all 
stored as strings, with no explanation (to either the programmer or 
the user) on how those dates are to be formatted.

JUnit testing: There were minimal JUnit tests. Those that were included
in the submission did not compile (specifically, they called constructors
with wrong signatures), and appeared to have been added at the end.

Write-up: The write-up gave appropriate coverage of what tools were
used (XStream, JavaFX), but provided no guidance in inspecting code
or using the application.

Features implemented: There were attempts at implementing the 
atomic/durative distinction, but it was impossible to tell to what 
extent. The Event class had a "categories" instance variable,
but that does not constitute a full implementation of that feature.

Documentation and style: There was essentially no documentation.

Concurrency: I did not see any concurrency problems, but that may have 
been taken care of by JavaFX (and the features that would have exposed 
concurrency problems were largely unimplemented).