Wattdepot Gauge Gadget

After last week's initial preparation of the gauge gadget we are to implement and retrieve data from Wattdepot. This was not really a huge problem for us since we integrated wattdepot for the monitor gadget we created for the 2nd milestone. This task was delegated to me and Jarret the threshold and refresh.

The biggest problem that we had while working on this project was debugging our code. Both Jarret and I tried to find the problem as to why our gadget won't load the gauge visualization. After looking through the code for 3 hours we found out the problem and it was a typo. We were passing a different div id as a parameter from our div tag's id. This just shows our real need for a better editor and a better way on running our gadget for testing purposes. We had to commit to our trunk every time we need to correct our code no matter how minute. I am currently using Eclipse with the basic plug-in for xml to edit the gadget. This was problem was really not a big deal since it was meant for testing purposes. I started out with a requirement to enter the whole data source url as to test our gadget's ability to retrieve from a source, google spreadsheet. The div tag was later replaced by a different id later on when I implemented wattdepot, which only requires a source string not the url.

During our 3 hour mishaps we sifted through the code trying to figure out what was wrong. It was a good opportunity for me to learn more about the gauge visualization and also by looking through the visualization api.

Here is a screen shot of our Wattdepot Gauge Gadget with the Kailua House as its source and monitoring the power consumed of the said source. Our host site can be accessed here.