WattDepot-Apps: Visualizer 1.0

The time has come for the first milestone in my Software Engineering class. My group and I are to unveil the first iteration of WattDepot-Apps. What we had boldly set out to do were the three applications I described in my previous posts (Visualizer, Browser, Monitor). Most of the past month was devoted to the development of the Visualizer, a web application with a User Interface that queries the WattDepot server and uses Google Visualization's Annotated Timeline/Chart to display the data.

WattDepot-App's updated Google Code Hosting site here

*Complete with featured wiki pages for end-users as well as developers curious about WattDepot and our project.

Both the stand-alone binary .jar for the Visualizer and the complete distribution .zip file can be downloaded at our Google Code site here.

The jar file is solely for the purpose of running the Visualizer whereas the distribution contains not only the classes for the Visualizer, but also the classes that are soon to be implemented, such as the Browser. There are still quite a few issues that need to be worked out with the Visualizer page, all the issues concerning the whole project can be found at the Issues Page here.

The gist of the Visualizers Issues includes:

• Multi-select capabilities
• Subsources Option

What I want to point out is that for this first milestone, what we wanted to present was "the" most completed aspect of our work. Therefore we actually downgraded the source multi-select to a drop-down menu since the multi-select checkboxes would only take the first source selected and ignore any of the other sources. We will definitely try and get the two mentioned issues completed and start working on the browser page. Those wanting to check out the trunk via SVN may do so, but v1.0 distribution and what's currently in the trunk is different. What's currently in the trunk is current work into v2.0 which is the multi-select elements.

Looking back this past month, there were a lot of constructs I had to revisit. Most of which being Wicket and Java, but I also dealt with some JavaScript, which I never touched, I even dived into some User Interface design aspects such as menu placement, browser compliance, and resolution issues.

The hardest part of this first milestone was just getting everything to work, reading up on how to implement specific elements such as Wicket's CheckboxMultipleSelect, implement JavaScript actions to invalidate options, and working with Google Visualizations. For the most part we always knew where we were headed, we just needed to get there.

An aspect I found semi-ironic was the laying out of tasks. Before and after every meeting with Kendyll and Bao, I always made sure we knew what tasks needed to be done, however, when it came time to actually do work, I still needed to see the Issues page and constantly remind myself and the others what we needed to get done.

What I've contributed to this first milestone included setting up the initial groundwork for all development, which included creating the Google Site, setting up a Continuous Integration job through Hudson, and creating the base site for WattDepot-Apps that runs through Ant. I've also added Wicket components to the Visualizer page, as well as other HTML components that is used to query WattDepot.

The next milestone we will probably resume work on this project and continue our same work habits. I believe if we maintain our work ethics and continue to output the same level, if not higher, we can truly develop the three stand-alone applications we set out to do.