33.DecathlonDesign3

I learned a great deal trying to make a pseudo-implementation of our decathlon design. In summary, Wicket is a fickle beast and blueprint CSS is useful. As for the 3 prime directives of software engineering, I will describe how our implementation met the required criteria:

1. The system successfully accomplishes a useful task.

I believe the objective of the system we implemented was to show a way a user would theoretically interact with the solar decalthlon house system. Our product is still a mockup of sort and was pitched to Professor Johnson, who will in turn show it to the leads in charge of the Solar Decathlon Project. The system's usefulness will be evaluated by whether anyone likes it or not. However, I believe we managed to create a useful implementation that will eventually help guide the direction of our ICS414 full implementation of the Solar Decathlon Home System. I believe this provides enough proof that we satisfy the 1st prime directive.

2. An external user can successfully install and use the system.

The documentation of our project can be found at http://code.google.com/p/solar-decathlon-teamhawaii-2/w/list. What is nice about the way wicket works is that one only simply needs to have java installed to run the wicket server via a .jar file. Our respective .jar can be found here. By simply typing in "java -jar wicket-solardecathlon1.3.1.jar," a user is able to start their own web server with our wicket content. This is quite clever as no other third party add-ons are needed.

External users can check-out our project being hosted on Google Code if they wish to see what we've done or wish to make changes (granted they have to be of the proper group). I believe this provides enough proof that we satisfy the 2nd prime directive.

3. An external developer can successfully understand and enhance the system.

Our code is well documented and we have run the ICS413 build system quite thoroughly to make sure the style is uniform with all the other projects being presented. The wiki page mentioned previously will also provide an external developer some other necessary documentation for them to build on what we have started. I believe this provides enough proof that we satisfy the 3rd prime directive.

If we had chance to do this all over again, I probably would have tried to make sure that certain naming conventions and css methodologies be followed when writing the code. There were a few cases were miscommunication on our parts lead to confusion and the wasting of time modifying variables in a convention that each of us would use, yet the others would not. Communication is a huge deal, and an important part of the development process. We had to have quite a few meetings and online chat sessions to make sure all of us were on the same page. The critiques from Professor Johnson during our final presentation proved we had to change our color scheme. Although it displayed well on our screens, it should display well universally. Testing once again struck with vengeance.


As an added note, getting jquery working with wicket was a fairly painful process to learn with the fullcalendar package. But I am confident now I will be able to successfully add more jquery features and move around css much more quickly thanks to the experience I've gained working with the wicket framework and the blueprint css package.