Done with WattDepot Monitor Gadget

Finally, our second milestone is approaching. However, I have to flight to the main land this Thursday and come back next Monday, which means I cannot accomplish too much during this period. Luckily, we do not have too much work left since last week and it turned out that my teammate did a great job this week. We released the WattDepot Monitor Gadget 1.2 as our final version. Here is the project hosting.

Basically, we have to work on two main things this week:
First, figure out a way to refresh the query instead of reload the entire page. In the beginning, we thought we might need to use AJAX. But Jarret found out that we only need to change a small thing to reach our goal. He uses setTimeOut method which is our current way to do the refresh, however, instead of pushing the windows reload function, he pushed the sendQuery function. The sendQuery function is the main function that talk to the server and retrieve data. In this way, we can refresh the gadget without loading the whole gadget. So we apply this feature for both Stoplight gadget and WattDepot Monitor Gadget. Both of them are much faster in updating now.

Second task is error handling. For our previous version of WattDepot Monitor Gadget, we didn't implement any error handling. This week, Paul implement some basic error handling for WattDepot Monitor Gadget. He checked the user inputs of host URL and Source Name to make sure both fields are not blank. Error handling about the google query can be implemented later.

What I did this week mostly are some utilities. For example I created a help page for our WattDepot Monitor Gadget. Also I fixed some existing bugs in the WattDepot Monitor, such as incorrect column name in the google query.

Anyhow, this is a screen shot for our WattDepot Monitor Gadget 1.2:


For next milestone, our class is going to regroup the student. I have no idea which project I am going to work on, but I had a good time with stoplight group. I made some friends and both Jarret and Paul are very talented people. Hopefully, we can work together later on.