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.