New Group Project/Gadgets in review

After a couple months of working with Google gadgets, our group has moved away from the Google gadgets with visualizations and instead we are going to concentrate more on the visualization aspect. By focusing on the visualization aspect some of the coding should be a little bit easier. I am not 100% sure on what exactly we have to accomplish in this next portion of the course so I will write in more detail what we plan on working on in my next blog. So, since we are shifting our focus a little, I have decided to write a review some of what I have learned from the gadget projects.

In the Google gadgets projects, we had to pass a lot of information back and fourth and retrieve data from many different sources. While making the stoplight gadget and also making the wattdepot monitor gadget, we had to do two things to get the gadget working. We first had to get the visualization aspect of the code up and running, which is written in javascript. We then had to get the visualization code to run and work with the xml code that google gadget uses. So the gadget xml code retrieved the user inputted data, which then passes the information to the javascript where the visualization code runs. This visualization code retrieves the current api from the visualization website and draws up the information we need to get the visualization working. On top of that, both the stoplight and monitor gadget is looking at a data spreadsheet that is constantly changing. Having the code run through all these steps to get it running was a little of a pain. Luckily, while working on the project we never ran into a problem where something small that was out of our control went down. For example, we never had a problem with the visualization code not retrieving the library for the visualization. So by just having to work with the visualization portion of the code, I hope to sharpen my javascripting.

Overall, it was very fun working with the Gadgets and my group mates. I have learned a lot working on this project, especially about svg images and javascript. I enjoy coding and hope that the next half of the semester will just as fun.