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.