Google Gadget: 1st Milestone

For our first milestone, we are to present a working and professional looking gadget that is simple but useful. Our version 1.3 Stoplight gadget is our project's first milestone. The gadget's functions include automatic refresh and threshold related messages, other functions that was implemented from the past versions include stoplight image, user inputted data source and threshold values. The stoplight messages is something that Yichi and I worked on and it was a little hard. After some research, we learned that the the gadget can only send and receive one query at a time so our solution was to separate the gadget query for the data and messages. Two script files, one for to display the stoplight image and the other to display the message, were created as a solution. Some other enhancements are purely aesthetic enhancements and it includes a better stoplight image and a drop down menu for the required input fields.

Since we've built our gadget by adding new functions on top of older ones for each version, I find that working on this first milestone project was fairly easy. The things that we've worked on most is improving the functions from the old versions and then implementing the new ones that we decided should encompass version 1.3. Such is the case with our stoplight image. During our meeting with Prof. Johnson, he told us that we needed a better image, one that shows the different colors clearly and resembles a real stoplight for a professional look. Other things we had to do was a major organizations of our files. Having the 'trunk' directory contain only the latest source codes, 'branches' as our individual repositories, and 'tags' which contains our gadget's past versions. We also had to improve the Stoplight Gadget site to reflect upon the changes we've made and to add user and developer guides.

After this first milestone we are planning on continuing with this project. For our next version we are shooting for the inclusion of error handling, scalable stoplight, and also maybe implement the 'plug' images from the HEEP project. I had a great time working on this project with my team. We always try and meet up at least twice a week which helped us delegate jobs easier and to keep us on track.