WattDepot WebApp Project

In the past week, I worked on a new project about WattDepot service with George, Aaron and Dean. For this project, we named it "e-hoomaluo" which means "conserve" in Hawaiian (I heard from George). It is to retrieve the hourly carbon content data from the WattDepot server for a given date. Also it analyzes the data and displays the hourly data in different colors so that people know when is the best to use energy.

-Red means the carbon content is pretty high and you should try to use energy as little as possible at this time.
-Yellow means the carbon content is at a medium level. You may use some energy but it might not be the best timing.
-Green means the carbon content is low and if you want to use some energy to do something, now is the best time.

Unlike the WattDepot Cli project, "e-hoomaluo" is a web application. Again, unlike the most web applications I worked on before(I mostly use javascript to do the programing), this time we used Apache Wicket, which is definitely a challenge for most of us. Luckily, our professor posted 5 example web applications that using Wicket, so that I can play arround and help me to get use to Wicket.

Frankly speaking, I am still not good at Wicket. As far as I know, you have to have an html file paired with a java file. For example, you have a page called testPage.html. If you want to use Wicket, you need to have a file called testPage.java. Also you need to assign a special attribute called "wicket:id" in the html file. It is the name that will be recognized in the java file.

In this project, I didn't do anything with the web programing. I was assigned to implement the class that creates the connection to WattDepot server and retrieving the carbon content data. Aaron and George worked on the implementation of the web page. Dean worked on the setup and the documentation. Since Dean was outside the island for this week, George, Aaron and I met almost everyday. I think our work went pretty smoothly. In the first meeting, we decided the design of the web page and split the work. Later I just worked on my own part. Finally, George merged everything together and created the distribution. The only challenge during the development is to use Wicket to change the CSS of the hourly data. I and George spent couple hours to solve that. I think the group project gives me a lot of motivation.

Here is the software ICU screenshot for "e-hoomaluo":


Unfortunately, we do not have a good coverage of our project. I think it is because that none of us is familiar with how to write test for Wicket. Probably in the next version, we can find a way to write junit test for Wicket program. Another issue is that the score for Churn is kind of low, again I am not sure how this score is measured. However, I think we did have a continuous development for this project.
Anyway, here is the link to get to the google project hosting for "e-hoomaluo". In this page, you can find the source of "e-hoomaluo" project and also the user guide and the developer guide.