Week 2

What happened this week

On Monday we went to Swisscom to finish the installation of our development environment. But we weren't successful. On Tuesday we were able to fix the problem and we could start with our project. It took again longer as we though all together. But we finished our discussion about the architectural layout and the design of the application. We discussed it with Zee, our technical assistant of the Swisscom. He agreed with us and gave us the "ok" to build our application like that.

Our architecture will consists of three layer: the qAPI, which is given by the Swisscom; the qDashboard server, a NodeJS server application which interacts with the qAPI and the client; and finally the dashboard application, the layer the end user sits in front of. Our qDashboard server will interact as a proxy between the qAPI and the dashboard application.

The qDashboard server will be a simple NodeJS server using sockets to interact with the client and using http requests to interact with the qAPI. The client will be an Angular application using sockets to fetch data and a Bootstrap template for the view.

So we knew with which tools we are going to use. Therefore we decided to make tutorials to learn how we have to use. We also made a list of the functionalities of the existing qDashboard, as Swisscom told us our qDashboard must have at least the same functionality, just much more prettier.

On Wednesday we went the second time to Swisscom for a status meeting. We could show them our first steps with all those technologies and we defined the points to do during the next days. Amongst others we set up the qDashboard server and wrote unit and functional tests for it and we customized the UI template. Now we're working on a simple example to fill a single page with data from the qAPI. This result we will show them on our next status meeting next Wednesday.

Core issue

The core issue this week was absolutely to get the complexity of those three layers (qAPI, qDashboard server, client) into our minds. We had long discussions and talks and tried to understand how this works everything together.

What is going to happen next

We're going to try to build a simple prototype which uses all three layers. So it should fetch data from the qAPI and send it over the qDashboard server to the client. We struggled all a lot with the complexity of the different technologies in the past few days and none of us has a real idea how the application in total should work. That's why we build the prototype to get a closer look about how these different layers interact with each other.