Wicket Good: Web App Development Using Wicket

No longer are we working in small pairs, but now we are a quartet of different people with different abilities. Will having a larger group with more responsibilities hinder our progress or will it be smooth sailing with that much knowledge on board. With our combined knowledge we are Greenometer!

After completing our Wattdepot clients last week, our group was paired up with another group forming our quartet and were assigned to create a web application that displays a table of carbon emissions for an requeste

d day. The table has a color code that will tell the user the carbon intensity of the grid at that hour to help them decide how to better manage their electrical usage.

One of the first things we did have was two group members clearly taking charge. Having a project manager to keep the work delegated and in track was very useful. Each part of the overall project was able to be laid out and each member was assigned a task base on their ability.

Those with more understanding of how to build a Wicket application did most of the development of the web app. While those who were more unfam

iliar were assigned to doing more menial tasks like gathering test data and documentation while looking at the development of the application to get a good understanding of wicket.

With one of our more knowledgeable members, Kelvin Green, we took an ambitious route and did more than the basic specifications. We took it up a level to add a better visual representation of the sampled data to give users a graphical layout of the data rather than a simple table format. One downside to this layout was that it is difficult to users to view the actual numbers from the sampled data.

Overall I believed we worked well together. Members were there to keep each other in check, and although we had varying schedules and were unable to meet face to face, the quick relay through email and online instant messaging was an acceptable substitute.

Here is a view of our HackyStats ICU data.

Many of the ares are pretty good. I would say it is an overall healthy system. We had a mild start with some development time and builds, but it really got going over the weekend which is expected for students.