Introducing Eco-Depot!

For my software engineering class, this past week has involved working on another aspect of interaction with the WattDepot client. Whereas before we focused on creating a command line interface for the system, this past week we began to look at designing a web application for it, which is intended to make the system more user-friendly and accessible to the general public. In particular, we were to design a web application that would take a date as input, and output a table showing the carbon content of the simulated Oahu grid per hour, analyzing if the carbon output is low, medium, or high. My group chose to name our project Eco-Depot.

This time, we got assigned to groups of four for the assignment, generally with two pairs being put into one larger group. At first, it was pretty difficult for me to work with a larger group. One thing was definitely the fact that we did not meet face-to-face much, and were not consistent with virtual communication. As a result, we ended up with a few instances of group members not realizing that tasks had not been completed, or group members wondering exactly what they were supposed to do.

My main task for the development of the web application was to write the Java code for the main interaction with the WattDepot client. The hardest part of this was anticipating what would be necessary for the people who were mainly writing Wicket. To tackle this problem, I first tired to extend the command line interface that Kendyll and I had written last week, but found that I was second-guessing myself, especially when trying to add things to the Wicket application. As a result, I wrote several key methods, let my team members work on it, then looked to that for feedback on what else I needed to write. The biggest disconnect that I noticed was when they used arrays to handle working with data, while lists were the most convenient data structure for my end of the programming.

Overall, I think that although my group got the assigned task done, we could have worked better together. The main thing that I think we needed to do was to communicate better; Kendyll and I had a good system of relying on Google's chat to talk while we were programming, and we knew that we would check our e-mail multiple times a day, but this didn't seem to be the case for our other two group members. Getting things like this straightened out from the start probably would have saved a lot of hassle and last-minute worry on our part.

Here is the ICU for our Eco-Depot project over the last week:

As you can probably tell from it, we did most of our coding over the weekend. I think this is an indication of an increased workload for all of our classes as the semester ends. Personally, I simply didn't have the time to dedicate to the project until the weekend because of projects and a take-home midterm due throughout the week.

Our initial version of the code can be downloaded from Google Code here. Please refer to the Wiki page for additional information regarding the use of the product.