Meetings for a clearer picture

After our first meeting with HEEP, we have gotten a better picture of what they want us to do. It was fairly similar to what we had in mind. Instead of a web application, we are going to design a widget to be placed on their new webpage. This widget will display various information to the users, such as the price of oil, a weekly report card of HEEP's progress, a cooling degree day chart, and a variation of the stoplight application.

I have mention before that HEEP have contracted an outside design company to create their new webpage. To make our collaboration transparent, HEEP has told the design company to leave an allotted space on webpage blank in place of where the finished widget will be place. This way, all they had to do is place our code into that allotted space and it should blend in with the rest of the page.

We had many "grand" ideas of how to implement this, but what we have found out after meeting with professor Johnson was these "grand" ideas might not be the most practical ways of implementing it. So after our meeting, we've decided the best way to implement this widget is to use Google Visualization and incorporate that with Google Docs. We will start with the Price of Oil widget first and see how that will turn out. We're giving ourself a deadline of 1 week for that widget.
So come back next week to find out our results.

Huge Leap with HEEP

This semester, we are taking a huge leap into real world software engineering. For the first time, we will be doing a collaboration project with people outside of the school. We will be working with people from the Hawaii Energy Efficiency Program (HEEP) to add an embedded web application to their website.

HEEP is a program created to inform Hawaii consumers to be more energy efficient. Their site currently contains information on alternative energy source such as solar energy and provides incentives for people to use such alternatives. They are currently in the process of designing a new website which they have already outsourced to a mainland company to do.

For this project, we will be collaboration with HEEP and the web design company in adding a web application to the new website. Some of the suggested applications are similar to the stoplight application and Oahu's grid application that we used in last semester's wicket project below.



We currently do not know the exact scope of the project since our first meeting with HEEP will not be until tomorrow. We hope that we will get a lot of our questions answers during the meeting and get a better picture of what we will be working on.

One concerns that we are worry about is how the design company feel about this collaboration. Since they were initially hired to do the job, we have to make sure that we do not "step on anyone's toes" or offend anyone.

This project seems like a great project to began the new year and I'm looking forward to getting my first experience working with professionals in our field.