SHA-1 is a secure hash algorithm (called by some the successor to MD5), to be used as some sort of password generator for an application that I understand about as little about as I do the mechanics of how the SHA-1 algorithm works. It does a lot of crazy math and bitwise math to come up with this fixed length magic number.
But I guess none of that’s really important. What it comes down to is that I was given a website with some javascript source code, and they (work) wanted that in Java with some trivial changes to the input/output types.
Converting JavaScript to Java is Ugly with a capital U. Mostly because the more I work with JavaScript the more I’m fully convinced weakly typed languages are inane and obnoxious…especially if you should ever have the misfortune of debugging anything gone awry in such a language. But even though its ugly, it’s kind of fun, I like making things less ugly.