Wattdepot Portable: Rounding 3rd!

Another week and a step closer to our second milestone. We are currently in the third week of milestone two. With one more week to go, just how close are we to completion?

This past week has seen some work from each member of the team. At last week's meeting, it has been decided that we are close to the completion of the project. The only thing left on the visualizer is a small issue with loading and column naming issues, along with testing. For the monitor page, we needed to have some error checking and do dynamic type conversions.

One great enhancement that will be useful for both applications is portability. We would like to make the urls portable by allowing users to share urls that pass parameters into the pages. Since this deals with both the monitor page is the visualizer page, as the middle man between both projects, I was assigned this task.

So far its been difficult. I do have portable urls working and the parameters being passed. Below we take a look at the new Urls being use for the applications.

Old Url: Very ugly, What the heck is "wicket:interface=:0:"?

• http://localhost:8003/wattdepotapps/home?wicket:interface=:0:MonitorPageButton::ILinkListener::

New Url: Nice url, 1.1 does represent the pageID, hoping to get rid of it in a future release.

• http://localhost:8003/wattdepotapps/monitor.1.1

Portable Url: All parameters passed using slashes in url encoding.

• http://localhost:8003/wattdepotapps/monitor/Source/SIM_AES/Type/Power%20Consumed/Interval/5%20sec

One problem I am currently running into is finding a way for the url to update without having the page refresh. Since the monitor does do a query or "monitor" in its case on load, I cannot just send all the parameters to a new page for the url and have it start. It is however possible for the visualizer which loads on start so I can apply my current code to the visualizer.

Hopefully I will run across a fix for this, or someone from the wicket mailing list will have an idea. For far no luck, but hopefully we will have a fix within the next week.

One last issue for the overall system is to have a dynamic host uri and port number arguments. This will be helpful because Robert wants to install a second Wattdepot server and using this command argument in the cli, we will be able to have both servers running. This does not seem too hard so it has been set to low priority, it is also there since we have nothing to test it with until Robert add this second server.

It has been recently decided that since we are approaching our next milestone and only two out of the three applications will be ready by then, it is a waste of resources of three people to be working on just the Browser application in the third milestone, so most likely we will be parting ways or if we share similar interests, we will be switching to new projects.

There are already a list of projects to choose from and many do look interesting, hopefully we are able to complete the two required applications we do have left to its fullest before we take our next step.