Devin Wright
Wiz Programmer
Wiz Programmer
After meeting with Don and James and getting a general view on what the project goals were I started with looking at the technology this week. Don had a PowerPoint with a mock-up design on it for the user-interface. They said that they wanted to move away from JQuery Mobile, so I started looking at JQuery UI some. I then developed a simple prototype of the PowerPoint they sent. I sent this to Don and James to review and they replied stating that we would mainly be focusing on the Charts and Chains menu's. A meeting has been set for February 8th to discuss in further detail of how the user interface should be changed.
As soon as we got ssh access and our version of the website I went on to checkout the current code base and get more familiar with the website. During our meeting Wednesday we decided that prototypes for the user interface should be made before we a lot of effort into splitting the code up into an unacceptable user interface. Two designs were discussed however, I might have another one or two that could be presented on the 17th. I will be working on quite a few of the prototypes and maybe test out what would work best as a library, either Bootstrap or JQuery UI or some other HTML5 library.
This week I researched more into Bootstrap to see what it provided for navigation and decided to use it's navbar for a prototype for our customer. I wanted to do more than just one prototype however other classes took up more of my time. Since I couldn't do more than one, we had a team meeting on Wednesday the 15th to discuss what other prototype Olivia and Christian could do along with briefly talking about the meeting with our customer on Wednesday the 22nd. Ultimately, I would say that the design of the navbar is not the biggest issue but rather the next step of separating out all of the code such that only 1 chart shows up would be the main issue. A user interface can always be changed around the core function. I looked more over the code given to use, trying to develop a flowchart in my head for how it functions and a way to tackle the problem without starting from scratch. I will be out from Wednesday to Sunday for a job interview in Georgia as a side note. Olivia also scheduled our meeting to review our midterm presentation with PresentationU for February 27th at 12:00.
We had the meeting on the 22nd in which we nailed down a design that the customer wanted, which ended up being our two prototypes merged together. We found out that we were mainly working on the Charts as the Chains aspect got merged in and out of itself during this meeting. After this I worked on a portion of the Design document (flowchart and data modules) and did similar work on the Presentation. Lastly, I merged the two prototypes together, which can be found here. I also started working on creating the ticker search bar and a date picker, so right now that prototype is still under construction.
I have been pretty busy with other classes this week, however, we went to PresentationU and presented. After getting good feedback, we made the changes and then met with Dr. Piwowarski. During this meeting we discussed our midterm status. I confirmed that my slides were polished and that the flowchart was better put together. Other than that it has just been a week of looking over the slides and practicing what I want to say during the presentation on Monday.
Wednesday we met with James and Don, I had errands so I met via a phone call and from what I heard they seemed very pleased with the results of our most recent prototype. I believe we hit Don's vision exactly and are moving in the right direction. A meeting was scheduled for Wendesday March 29th where we will present our most recent progress. I would like to have done by that point ticker selection along with basic charts showing when a ticker is selected. It would also be nice to get the smaller essentials of the website done (logging in, browsing to new pages i.e. the help page). I was working full time over Spring Break therefore, I didn't get much work done on it.
This week I have been working on mainly the back-end function of autocomplete ticker searching. I ran into so many issues with getting this done and I would like to go over these issues. To start, I began to look into how the original code worked and tried to just port it over to the new website. Unfortunately I found out that the originally code relied greatly on jQuery Mobile, which, as stated before, is something our customer wants to get away from. Therefore, I had to find a work around for this. When Googling for "Bootstrap search autocomplete" I found many links discussing Typeahead.js and Bloodhound.js which are JavaScript libraries based on Twitter's search function. I decided that we should go with this as there seemed to be a bit of support as well as docs for it (located here). However, since this library has been around for a while it has been through a lot of revisions and I had to figure out how exactly it work. I eventually finally got results that matched the original on Saturday. Now I am hoping we can get the basic chart to show up before our meeting with the customer next week. I would say that this issue alone set up back about a week (how long it took for me to get it working correctly). Over all the code changes involved new JavaScript that is based on Typeahead and Bloodhound in the index page as well as a rewrite of the PHP file for the SQL queries. You can see our progress currently here, however it looks bad at the moment since I was focusing on the back-end functionality.
Our meeting with the customer was rather upsetting. They were not pleased with the set back and stated that they wanted to be informed whenever there is a problem like this so that they could help. Essentially we were told to now just focus on the actual separation of the charts. After this meeting I immediately started working more on separating out the charts into functions. I got a couple done however this weekend I also injured my back therefore progress has slowed as it is hard for me to sit down at my computer I hope to have more charts separated by the following week both for the Code Review and our next meeting with the customer.
This week I worked very hard on separating out as many charts as I could. I was able to get quite a few done, however there are a couple I want to talk to the customer about a little more before continuing. I missed the testing review as I ended up pinching a nerve in my lower back which also put a kink in coding as well. I went through and documented the additional code I added as well to make sure it was polished for our code review. I will continue forward with this style of coding until code delivery.
This week I worked on the changes that Don and James mentioned, as these were mostly just appearance changes. I began to also look at the code for separating out the few charts that still need to be done as they are a bit more involved than the other ones. Lastly, I implemented a couple of appearances changes that I thought would end up being really nice looking in the end. I would like to now move this change to more than just one chart. I looked over the presentation Olivia made to prepare for our practice on Monday.
This week I mainly focused on the presentation and practicing it and adding final touches to my slides. I have put thought into finishing up the project as well but no code was actually written as it was a busy week in other classes as well.
Had final presentation and it went pretty well. James seemed pleased. Still had more charts and final touches to add before we deliver the code on May 3rd. I worked on this from Friday to Monday, May 1st. We are finalizing everything on Tuesday May 2nd for delivery on the 3rd. This is the final update.