WattDepot Data Miner 1.0.1

Finally, this week I have finished the first version of the WattDepot Data Retrieval Library, which I called WattDepot DataMiner. I have also created a Google project hosting for WattDepot DataMiner. In this blog post, I will brief explain what feature this library has and direction of future development.

As I mentioned in previous blog post, WattDepot DataMiner is designed to facilitate developers in data retrieval tasks related with a WattDepot server. Therefore, first of all, it has three functions that take care of the Ajax calls:
1. a function to take care of the creation of a xmlHttpRequest object.
2. a function that sets all the important parameters of an Ajax call.
3. a function send the xmlHttpRequest and handle the response.

Since the data retrieved from the WattDepot server are Xml files, it is necessary to convert them into a more JavaScript oriented format, such as JSON, so that developers can easily manipulate the retrieved data. Therefore, WattDepot DataMiner has a convert function that convert the raw data to a JSON object.

Even though the retrieved data are represented in a JSON object, the internal structure is still the same as in the xml file. Since most people, who are new to WattDepot, probably are not familiar with the xml structure, it is hard for them to find the desiring field in the response. To help those people, there is a function that loop through a JSON object and return the node with a specific name.

Further more, WattDepot-DataMiner has three data-retrieval functions: getAllSources(), getSourceSensorData(), getSourceLatestSensorData(). These functions are some typical data-retrieval functions from all the data-retrieval functions. They used for test the functionality of other functions for now.

Future development that I planed:

1. Keep adding some more data-retrieval functions to the library, so that WattDepot DataMiner can handle more data retrieval tasks.
2. Use WattDepot DataMiner to rebuild some existing visualizations, so that I can find out what else feature I need to add to the library.