Stoplight Gadget 1.2, a leap from 1.0

For this week's gadget version, we've managed to combine two version functions into one, hence the leap from 1.0 to 1.2. We have combined two similar functions that we seemed easy to do so. Our initial meeting with Prof. Johnson had resulted in the split of these function into different version. The two functions are user input data source and the threshold values. Some of the other things we have accomplished is the addition of the stoplight image itself. Since we only have to display the stoplight for different threshold values it was fairly easy to implement the stoplight.

My task for the combined version was to do the user input threshold values, but since we decided to combine it this job fell into Yichi's hands since he was doing the other function, mainly the input data source. My new job was to research for a solution to a problem that we've encountered during our implementation of the new functions. We needed to find a better way to access our script and xml files because they were saved from Yichi's Unix account. We initially tried to gain access to these files through our Stoplight Gadget project hosting site. We have presented the problem to our weekly meeting with Professor Johnson and they have provided us with the best information to solving our problem. They have suggested that we needed to change the svn:mime-type of the files were trying to access. It turns out that Prof. Johnson had encountered such similar problem and has written a blog entry about it. The posting was very helpful but a reply to the posting helped me directly with my problem. It links to a different project hosting site called Flexlib and within its Wiki pages they explained how to access the SVN config to enable auto-props and provided a list of file format values.

After finding out how mime-type works, we have discovered anther way we can access our scripts withing Google project hosting and without changing the properties of the file. When browsing the files in the source, there is a link to the view the raw file in the right details panel. This is the easiest way for us to link the our scripts url with the gadget.

Next week will be our first milestone for our Stoplight Gadget and we hope to be able to have a version ready for release. Some of the function that we'll be working on are the addition of messages that interprets what the stoplight is showing or to return errors, scalable image and error handling.