Reviewing the Greendepot Wicket Web Application

The application that I worked on as described in my last blog post was a class project in which each group of 3-4 members created their own application. Here, I present a coding review of the Greendepot web application, which can be found on Google Code here.

My full review of the project can be downloaded here, but in this blog post, I would like to make comments on a few key points regarding the project.

First of all, the application just needs a bit more time and work. The main thing is that results are printed on the command line, rather than on the web page. This is one thing that definitely needs to be cleaned up before the next version release, as it is not very user-friendly. Additionally, although it provides the carbon content for each hour for a day, it does not analyze the actual numbers to say if it would be a good idea to use electricity at a specific time or not.

Second, I found one area in the code that would be worth considering refactoring. This is the setDate method in the CarbonCalculator class. Briefly, this method seems to do a lot more than its name implies, so at the very least the method name should be changed, although I think it would be best to split up the tasks done by the method. Rather than setting the date, creating a list of data, and saving the string of data (for output purposes), it would be better if these three tasks should be split into three separate methods.

Finally, in regards to Continuous Integration, I would like to make the point that the Hudson build for the greendepot project does not seem to be executing any Ant tasks when changes in the code are detected. This is important for monitoring the project and should be fixed as soon as possible.

Again, these are the two main problems that I found. Please refer to my full review, referenced above, for complete comments.