30.WicketChart

The Wicket Project we were assigned was to implement a one page web application that provides two components: 

1. A form that accepts a variety of parameters
2. Along with a submit button that when pressed, generates a GoogleOMeter visualization.  

To see what a GoogleOMeter is, go to http://imagecharteditor.appspot.com/, then click "Show full gallery", then scroll to the bottom.  The last three visualizations are GoogleOMeters. I ended up choosing the 3rd visualization

The form should allow the user to: 

• Set the start and end of the Y axis;
• Set the title
• Set the width
• Set the height
• Provide a data value for the pointer

The web application in general should:

• Use Wicket
• Use Blueprint CSS for layout
• Use the ICS 413 build system
• Provide at least one useful test case
• Employ sessions so that multiple users can generate charts independently

In terms of testing, I employed that the lower bound and upper bound values would have error checking to see if the user had inputted nonnumerical characters. Since extract a string from these text boxes via Double.parseDouble(), if there is, for example, a letter in the "Lower Bound" text box, this would cause an exception. My program catches this exception and immediately sets the values of all the bounds, lower, mean, and upper to zero. On the case that the user enters correct input, the "Mean" becomes the average of the lower and upper bounds. My JUnit test explicitly tests for this particular case of erroneous user input and verifies that the "Mean" value gets set to "0.0" to allow for the chart to still be created with safe values.

The overall experience of this assignment was quite good. The CSS grid style layout was fun to play and felt similar to other grid layouts used in other various programming language interface structures. See http://www.learncomputer.com/blueprint-css/ for reference on the CSS system we employ in our web application.


Using sessions and the ICS413 build system proved to be tedious, but nice once everything was working properly. Going through all the errors and satisfying what was generated by our style checkers (build.pmd.xml and build.checkstyle.xml) was a pain to say the least. It was almost as painful as porting the form provided by Professor Johnson's wicket-example06 into a single page to be viewed and interacted with by a user. It really forced me to read through the code and figure out how the wicket system works. However, the overall experience was a good exercise in problem solving and hard work. I look forward to working with Wicket in the future.

My distribution for this assignment can be found here.