Javascript & Date

For this week, our team worked on both Stoplight Gadget and WattDepot Gadget Monitor again. Although we committed our Stoplight 1.5 as our final version, it seems that there is always new requirement. Professor Johnson asked us to use another way to represent the message data. So we decide to let Jarret work on this task. He ran into some small problems, but he finally conquered them and release the new Stoplight Gadget 1.6. Hopefully, it brings an end to this project for now.

On the other hand, I worked on WattDepot Gadget Monitor. This week, we are ready to connect the WattDepot Gadget Monitor to the WattDepot Server (We were using Google Spreadsheet before). I basically follow the WattDepot documentation and modify the data source URL according to the user input. Another thing came up this week is formatting date object in JavaScript. In Google data table, date is formatted as MMM dd, yyyy hh:mm:ss. However, the JavaScript built-in date object does not have a method to convert the month to some string like "Jan" or "Feb". Therefore, I have to make a simple function to convert month number to relative text. Since JavaScript is a very popular language now days, I would say it will be much easier for user if the developers can provide more date conversions.

I am still having difficulties in generating the drop down menu dynamically. I have post my question in the Google Gadget discussion group, but no one replied yet. So we make the source input as a text box instead of a hard-coded drop down menu. Hopefully, some one can response my post and I can generate the source drop down menu dynamically.