Stoplight Gadget Version 1.0

Originally, our group thought that we were making a stoplight gadget that would work with the Wattdepot server. Last Wednesday we had a meeting with our professor on exactly what he wanted us to implement in creating this stoplight gadget. This meeting cleared up a lot on confusion that we originally had. We found out that we will try to create a generic stoplight gadget that anyone can use by inputting their own thresholds. For instance a person might want to use the stoplight to help keep track of waveheights, where they could maybe set the stoplight to be green when the waves are above a certain height and red when the waves are small. So over the past week since our meeting, we got started on the stoplight gadget project.

Our version 1.0 of our project doesn't do much of anything. To make sure that we are able to get everything working together, version 1.0 of the stoplight project just returns a number that can be found on a spreadsheet from google docs. We first created a google visualization to run and retrieve the number from the spreadsheet. When we tried to simply move the code and copy the visualization into the google editor that we were using, we ran into a little bit of problems. For one thing, after we simply copied the code into the tags and saved in the google editor, we were not able to reopen the file from the google editor. To open the file in the google editor we had to open the file from a URL. After tinkering with the code for a few hours, we were able to get the code running as a google gadget. Our code can be found here.

We are looking into using an IDE that could help us with the google gadget editing since there are still some bugs with the google editor gadget online. We have just found that Eclipse has a plugin for google gadgets. We will hopefully decide to use the IDE for further development.

For version 1.1, we are planning to implement a picture stoplight with hard-coded thresholds. We also have to figure out where the user will get their data from that they will use with the stoplight gadget. We hope to get all that up and running by next week.

Software Engineering Part 2

Hi everyone! This is my first blog for the new semester. This new set of blogs will concentrate on the happenings of the second half of my software engineering experiences and projects. The class will be concentrating of further developing the wattdepot service. The professor plans on trying to create an energy conservation game for the University of Hawaii dorms by the end of the semester.

To start the semester, the class was divided up into smaller groups where each group has a task to accomplish. I was assigned to a group that is dedicated to creating a stoplight using google visualizations and also google gadgets. We have to figure out how to connect to the wattdepot server and output the current electrical output. This will be similar to the stoplight that we had to make in our last semester. This first week my group will be learning javascript since it is accompanied with google gadgets and visualizations.

We are a little unsure about what we exactly have to accomplish. So to get started on the project we have studied up on our javascript, google gadgets, and visualizations. To refresh myself on javascript I skimmed though a javascript book that I have had from a scripting class that I have taken at UH. To learn about google gadgets I did the tutorials that was given to our group by our professor, found here. I still have to look over google visualizations, but for now our group is not sure how we are going to incorporate google visualizations into making a gadget stoplight.