WattDepot-Apps V1.0 – Milestone 1: The Mile of Stone

After working hard for a quarter of the semester already, our project has hit its first milestone, WattDepot-Apps version 1.0 out of “beta” and out for release. As I’ve been writing about for the past few weeks the project focused on the creation of an application/web service that uses the WattDepot System and the Google Visualization API to create a way for users to look at data from electrical power monitoring devices in an illustrative fashion. Today marks our first actual presentable checkpoint and with it, the need to create a presentable construct for show.

Let me backtrack a little here as a way of clarifying how the weeks have culminated to this point. The past couple weeks while we’ve been scrambling through our code and constructing ideas and deconstruction malfunctions, throwing away parts that were nothing but problems and integrating things we thought would work, we were meeting weekly with Robert Brewer, our WattDepot Liaison of sorts (since he is creating and modifying the WattDepot system as we work), and with Professor Johnson in a kind of informal checkup. It was formal for us to meet with him to show as students that we were working and to get feedback, but the Milestone represents the business presentation angle of our work. As this case required more refined display of output than any informal meeting our goals were slightly shifted for the week.

To begin with, the browser which we were trying to get to work through a portion of last week became of little concern. More of less the browser became a figurative scrap paper that we’d sweep under the rug presentation wise so that we can show the good things. Our team focused on the Visualizer, removing the extraneous issues and patching up the working parts to create a solid system that could leave our hands if necessary and still be workable.

While Ed worked hard trying to get multi-selection sources working (a point which we had to abandon for this checkpoint), Bao took over partly from my work last time and worked on the Javascript access for different types of data. My focus became making sure the cancel button was in, trying to fix the tables, and cleaning up the code/js comments.

The Cancel button was simple enough though this week was filled with awkward moments. Several times it felt like my system just wanted to do weird things, earlier attempts at adding buttons instead of links to cancel resulted in them appearing out of desired areas and yet were added later with no problem by Ed. Then later a visual oddity occurred for my use of the interface with the scrollbars for the side areas not working. It seems that system differences really can make quite the difference, even indevelopment.

The button put in ok, and research running me in circles till I concluded that at least for this checkpoint that the table would be unchangeable, I moved on to cleaning code. While I did this Bao took some of my JS commenting off my hands, which I was ok with as long as he could handle it and I checked it after. The code clean up was an interesting aspect. While the code itself is completely functional in its older state, the organization for it was rather bad and putting it into more readable style proved to be rather interesting, since at the moment we don’t really have a system for easily adjusting HTML/JS to style. With it done, I helped us wrap things together by putting together the necessary coding project Wiki’s (you can visit them here). These complete the project’s package appearance by making it ready for outside use or sampling.

Overall the difficulty came in trying to shift the style of work we were doing. I think up to this point we had done a lot of the plowing forward position of programming but we didn’t exactly pay attention to what was going on in our wake. As a result there was a lot of clean up and things which we didn’t notice weren’t exactly perfect (like how Internet Explorer interprets our code for example). Still our team stood together and with our natural rhythm somehow working together we were able to get out our Version1.0 for release here.

I believe we are going to keep our team going and work on this project with full force into the next milestone. There is nothing wrong with the concept of switching it up but we’ve invested a lot of work so far and I think we could do even more as we keep working. At this point it feels like we are a bit behind our normal projections but together and with our increasing understanding of the situation and the necessary parts of our output I think we’ll come out stronger as we continue.

Once again you can find our Google code project here.
Our Wiki guides (for explorative users and developers) can be found here.
Download the release version (both in jar and with bits of future parts in .zip) here.
Our issues current and future can be found here as well.