This is it... the Stoplight Gadget

Finally, our last version of stoplight gadget,Stoplight Gadget 1.4, is released. From now on, we are going to pause our development on Stoplight Gadget. We have added it to the Google Gadget gallery so that other people may use it or improve it.

In this week, we made several enhancement. First of all, we added a new user input field called 'Unit', which let user specify the unit of the data from the data source. In addition, we modified the auto-refresh system so that the message get refreshed as well. Further more, we added some error checking in the gadget. We also tried to make our stoplight image scalable, but we didn't successfully implement it.

My task this week was fixing the auto-refresh system. This bug was discovered last week in the meeting with Dr. Johnson. In Stoplight Gadget 1.3, the message area is not auto-refreshed. This function is implemented by using a default method in Google.Visualization.Query class called setRefreshInterval. This method will send the query every certain time period. However, I found that the query will only be sent if the data in the data source is changed. Since the message source did not change when we changed the data source, the query for helpful message was not sent. That's why the message area is not auto-refreshed. In this version, I used the most common JavaScript method: system.timeout method. This will refresh the page for every certain time period. It works a little bit slower than the Google Query method, but acceptable.

Second thing I worked on this week is to determine the "direction", which tells whether the lower number is preferable or the larger number is preferable. In the current version, the gadget will compare the two values that user set for green threshold and red threshold. If the green threshold is smaller, then lower number will be preferable. If the green threshold is larger, then larger number will be preferable.

Basically, this is it, our first Google Gadget. I would say I earned a lot of experience in Google Gadget development. The most enjoyable thing for me is the joy of solving the problems that I run into during the development. The next week, we are going to work on something else. Hopefully, it will be a fun project.