Software Engineering Experience

Taking this course really helped me mature as a developer. I learned so much in just one semester. The thing that I liked the most in this class is that we worked on real world applications unlike ICS 111 and 211. Another aspect of the course that I liked is the collaboration of students. In the past we were not supposed to share our work with other student in class. This course is proof that two minds are better than one. It's good to work with other people once in a while. I think it's a win-win situation because everybody gains from collaborating with each other.

I mentioned that collaboration is the best part of this course for me. I've met some awesome people and I'm glad that I was paired up with them. Even though there were times where it was really tough for us working late at night at Sinclair, we were able to keep the morale up high. The tools that were introduced to us in this course will be really helpful in the future as a developer. Version control like SVN and software ICU are some of my favorites. I'm actually looking forward for the next level of this class.

-David Joel Lazaro

Ecologineers v2.1

Our web application has come a long way since version 1.0. We've done a lot of bug fixes and added a couple of new pages that gives user's useful information. One of the pages we've added was the Home page. This is simply an introduction of our web application and what the other pages does. The second page that we added is the StopLight page. This page provides the user information depending on the carbon intensity of SIM_OAHU_GRID. It has four categories, green, yellow, red, and no data. This gives the user an idea of when they should be plugging their devices to the outlet. The third page is just a modified version 1.0 grid info page that displays the carbon intensity chart for SIM_OAHU_GRID. The user can now select a start and end date for the time period that they want a chart generated for. The user can also select from a pull down menu SIM_OAHU_GRID's sub-sources.

We tried to implement some extra credit features to our web application. One of them is the addition of nice urls for the links. Instead of the wicket gibberish url that it displays in the address bar, it now shows a nice bookmark-able link that is easier to remember. This means that the StopLight page is now called "stoplight" and the GridInfo page is now called "gridinfo" in the address bar of our browser. We also added an ajax page refresh for the StopLight page. What it does is it refreshes the page every minute so that it can update the users quickly instead of waiting for another hour to manually refresh the page.

Working on this application thought me some valuable lessons. It's clear that one person can only do so much. After trying to implement something for hours, I had to walk away from it and pass it to one of my group members. It's also nice to learn something new. The wicket framework can be really useful if I continue to learn it.

To try our updated web application, click here.

-David Joel Lazaro