Three Weeks Down! One to Go! Scramble For The FInish Line!

We are now entering the fourth week of school and the third week of out first project, Wattdepot-Apps. Its been a bumpy trip, but an overall good experience.

Continuing on from last weeks post, we are still currently working on the first two parts of our three part design, the visualizer and the browser page.

In the previous week, the entire team was busy with other classes taking up their time, and two out of the three of use were unavailable during the entire weekend. This delayed the progress of the overall project a little bit, but I believe we were able to churn out a decent amount of enhancements.

The first new thing that we've added to the project is the base page for the WattDepot browser. Ed, our wicket hero has put up the base layout and the ball is now in Kendyll's court to implement the call for the source summaries. We are currently hitting some snags at this point in the browser development as we haven't yet completed the basic functionality of the page for public users. We hope to have this resolved as soon as Wednesday.

Last week Ed and I had finished completing the base page for the visualization and implementing the basic functionality, Ed working most of the wicket and the page layout, and I doing most of the javascript. Since Ed and I were busy during the weekend, we handed the visualization to Kendyll who converted the annotated time line we used into tabular form. To further add upon this we implemented many suggestions that arose during our weekly meetings with Professor Johnson. One of the things we have progressed on so far is having combination box selection for items. Although only the datatypes are currently functional with multiple selection.

Ed and I have also been able to resolve the problem of granularity of the sampling intervals. The problem arose last week when we noticed that when sampling the smallest time frame (during that implementation), one day, it would take well over five minutes and counting and even possibly time out one the data query, when the sampling interval was set to lower than 10~ minutes. We discussed our plan of action with Robert and Johnson at the meeting and we came to the conclusion that we would keep the small interval, but allow the user to choose a smaller time period such as one hour~. So, yesterday morning, Ed had added in time picker drop downs for us to use, and I was able to link them into the timestamp generation functions. We are now able to pick right down to the minute. (Although it is unwise to choose 1 min)

Overall, we are still on track to completing on time, although we have fallen behind a slight bit. We hope to be able to resolve the issues we are facing and plan to switch our focus on the problems with the browser ahead. We can delay enhancements on the visualization in order to have complete functionality of the other two items, but as it stands, we are still waiting on user data for the browser and real time updates from wattdepot, but that area is still waiting confirmation from Robert.