WattDepot

WattDepot is an interesting project that we have been working on over the past week or so. Its function is to retrieve various useful information such as energy consumption, carbon emission, or power consumption from the WattDepot server. My experience with building the WattDepot program was a valuable one. It seems that the world is headed towards the notion of energy conservation and knowing how to deal with this type of application certainly would benefit us in the future.

This WattDepot project turns out to be our first real group project this semester. As our class exercise, me and my group mate discussed about the overall design of the project and also about how we wanted to work on the project and when. I feel now that it is really important that we discuss the details of the project before we start touching the code. That way, we can both be sure that we know exactly what to do. It sounds very simple, but it is an important concept.

Building our project was not an easy task. The assignment basically was split into 10 parts, or commands. My group mate and I decided that we will split the work in half and this idea turned out to be quite efficient. The only problem we had with building our commands was that it was fairly difficult to check if the output we got was indeed the correct one. Only after checking with other groups we were finally able to see whether the output was correct or not. Although this was quite a bit of inconvenience for us, it actually motivated us to go out and ask around other people about their outputs.

Building our interfaces was a farily complicated task. We were able to set up our project so that it implements multiple interfaces for different set of codes. For example, we set up an interface for class file that contains all the functions that deal with the commands, and we set up another interface for class file that deals with parsing of strings. We were; however, not able to write all of our commands into separate classes, and have the them hash to String variables. We were able to build about 9 test cases that test various functions in our project. I would say that most part of our project turned out fairly well. We may need to work a little bit harder on building the functions into separate classes.

Here is my distribution file.