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.