WattDepot Visualizer Underway

For this past week in Software Engineering, I have been working on the first stand-alone web application for WattDepot-Apps, the WattDepot Visualizer. The name hasn't officially been decided, but I'm just sticking with WattDepot Visualizer for now. So far, I believe that project WattDepot-Apps has met our set deadlines and is currently progressing nicely.

First off, by the next day, Tuesday 1/19 team WattDepot-Apps had a meeting with Prof. Johnson to talk about the general direction we'll be heading. We decided on which Google Visualization to implement, and with much debate had got it down to either Annotated Timeline or Multi-colored Bar Graph. Considering the pros and cons of each, it was decided that an Annotated Timeline would be much cleaner to use.

On the same day we discussed the overall functionality of what each page should do. The game plan is to complete one application at a time so most of the discussion was geared towards the functionality of the Visualizer page.

To split up the work, I would be the one to set-up the initial ground work for everything to do done. This included an initial Java/Wicket project that will be hosted in the Google Project Hosting - WattDepot Apps. Apply Software Engineering techniques such as Continuous Integration through Hudson and automated Quality Assurance tools with Ant.

Bao seemed to be the most eager and strong in JavaScript so he would be the one to set-up the initial JavaScript that will take the input through the UI elements on the page, and create a query to be sent to WattDepot, and hand the response to Google Visualization and output the Annotated Timeline.

After the Bao completes the initial JavaScripts, it would be Kendyll's job to convert the Annotated Timeline into another visualization, be a Table, so the user can interactively inspect WattDepot data through hard numbers instead of just a graph. Looking for project Carbonometer for inspiration, Kendyll also will look into why their visualization currently no longer works, which was also brought up at the meeting.

By 1/21, I uploaded an initial site that laid the general work area that the whole group will be using. For now, the project contains basic UI elements. The major thing that will be changed is the drop-down menus. They will eventually be changed to multi-selection boxes so users can select multiple sources and display multiple data types in a single visualization. But for now in this initial set-up we just want to get a running visualizer working that actually query's the WattDepot server, get a response, and pass that response to Google and get the visualizer to display on the page.

The end of this past weekend, Bao had completed JavaScripting and managed to get the visualizer up and running. Now that the visualizer is in place, Kendyll now takes over and will add in data tabulation, as well as look at some minor aesthetics since right now the page is pretty plain.

I'd say that the most difficult obstacles this week was planning out a general layout for all the User Interface elements such as drop-down boxes, date pickers, the visualization itself, and meeting general functionality requirements. There were a few coding issues that had to be addressed, but we got through them. We see each other everyday so the project is constantly being talked about and comments/suggestions are always being thrown around.

The goals for this week is to improve upon the current visualizer and hopefully get a start on the Browser page. To improve on the visualizer we will need to switch out drop-down menus and replace them with multi-selection elements and set-up more advanced JavaScript code that will gray out certain options depending on what the user selects. I believe this will be the most difficult stage since it deals more intense coding that any other step.

ICS 414: Software Engineering Season 2

It's the start of a new semester and for this one, I'm currently taking the second half of Software Engineering. Prof. Johnson, the same professor as last semester's ICS 413, is teaching this semester's ICS 414.

Continuing off from last semester, where the last stages of our final project was based on the idea of saving energy and going green, we are continuing with project WattDepot, but this time we are working together with graduates, and outside organizations such as HEEP - Hawai'i Energy Efficiency Program to expand the idea of going green and saving energy.

There were many ideas that were pitched on our first day.

Here are some possible sub-projects that are currently underway:

WattDepot apps:

    • A set of stand-alone webapps for WattDepot.

Google Stoplight Visualization:

    • General purpose stoplight widget.

Hawaii Energy Efficiency Program apps:

    • Oahu grid data inside the HEEP website.

Kukui Cup technology prototypes:

    • Dorm energy competition website.

Kukui Cup competition design:

    • Content and structure of the competition.

Energy meter design:

    • Hardware and software specs for dorm energy meters.

There will be 4 milestones throughout the semester, at each milestone we will be give a final report and a deliverable on what we accomplished.

For this first milestone, I am working in project WattDepot-Apps. For this project, I feel I am on familiar grounds since this is probably the only project that's almost exactly like what we were doing last semester. Essentially, for WattDepot-Apps we want to quickly visualize the WattDepot repository using Google Visualizations to accomplish this.

For WattDepot-Apps, there are 3 possible stand-alone apps we will be taking on:

WattDepotVisualizer:

    • Use Google Visualizations to interactively display various data from the WattDepot service.

WattDepotBrowser:

    • Interactively inspect WattDepot

WattDepotMonitor:

    • Provide real-time updates and automatically push recent data w/o constantly polling WattDepot.

We were assigned our groups last week Thursday and have begun the organization process. Within the past week we have set up our initial Google Project Hosting named WattDepot-Apps right now it's not much to look at, but we set up Issues for each member.

For inspiration we've taken a look at last semesters proto-type projects Carbonometer and Greenometer. The base functionality exists, but they require some tweaking in order to get each up to specifics.

Some of the difficulties in this first stage was how to divide the work. Since this was relatively new, and the deadlines were a little strict, it's hard to tell how much of each sub-project we would actually get finished. For this reason, we decided to take each sub-project as a 1 week deadline, and micro-manage each part. What we've decided to do can be summarized by looking at our Issues Page in our Google Project, I suggest clicking on Grid View to get a more organized view of what each person in our group is doing. Most of the initial tasks are research and determining what things we should add. Some of the more immediate coding aspects are setting up the initial site for each stand-alone application to run.

Our goal for this week is to get an initial site uploaded to the trunk of your project. The bare skeleton will have atleast 1 page, for the Google Visualization, Wicket UI elements, a test case, and also JavaScript to test querying WattDepot. Probably about mid-way through the week we will have settled on which Google Visualization to implement, and also start brainstorming on display elements for the WattDepotBrowser.