Sunday, November 27, 2011

Hale-Aloha Pichu

WattDepot is an open source web service that will collect energy usage from the places where the meters are installed. Previously I implemented a total of six katas to get an initial understanding of how to retrieve data from the servers, and how some methods works; description of the katas can be found at this link Watt_Monitor. This time I am fortunate to have two great team members to assist in implementing a console base program to have people interact with retrieving information from the servers.

My team members and I initially had no clue of how the program should behave. We did not know how we can access a class based on the name of a command entered by the user. We even had no clue of what we were suppose to test. At that moment it felt like how are we suppose to accomplish this project, but I’m glad it is a group project because it made us realized that we were thinking too much at once. Therefore, we decided to first start off by getting the parts that we got assigned (parts were assigned by the group) to work. It ensures that at least we have something to focus on as a starting point.

My group’s program functionality is to start off by automatically connecting the user to the server at Hale Aloha. After connection has been established, the user can enter a command and the parameters to retrieve specific information from the server. For example, if the user wants to retrieve information about energy usage of a certain date he/she can type in the following: daily-energy Ilima 2011-11-23 where daily energy is the command, and both Ilima and the date are the parameters. If user is using the program for the first time, he/she is able to learn how to use it by typing the command “help” to display descriptions on what each available command does.

We also tried to research and implement the program by using Java Reflection to access the other classes in the program but from different packages. What is Java Reflection? It is just a feature in Java which examines and manipulates the properties within the program (Java_Reflection).

Through this project, which involved cooperating with partners, I learned that communication is a major criterion in getting the project done. By communicating among each other we were able to contribute ideas and create a program that actually was better than what I imagined initially. In my point of view my group did had communication problems due to each team members thinking differently of how some features should work. Also, one team member didn’t keep in contact with the other team members. Overall, it was a good experience because it taught me how to tackle the problem of communication problems for future projects that involves partners.

           
             

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