Sunday, April 5, 2009

ICS 499: Match Building

Introduction
This week's iteration of Devcathlon required a lot of thought and research. The scoreboard went through another design in order to fill up screen space and reorganize the layout. Encountered issues with memory in Findbugs and building a Match to start testing the system.

Scoreboard
The scoreboard seems to be a hot topic within the group as it consumed our attention at the beginning of the week. Everyone decided to go with the design on the left. The new layout is simple and makes good use of screen space as you can see very little white in the background. Anthony Du came up with great idea of using Panels to implement a modular approach to the scoreboard. So each piece can be refreshed at according to whatever interval the administrator chooses. However, the Matches section, because it tracks all ongoing matches will be updated every 60 seconds.


Matches
One of the difficulties I am having is creating a Match. Part of the problem with Match creation is with the instantiation of a project. To create a project in Hackystat.
  • A user must receive and accept an invitation.
  • Must have access to Hackystat server for the SensorbaseClient.
  • The project must have an owner.
There is a lot involved in creating a Match that requires another day of tinkering. The alternative would be to implement a custom Project class that does not require the Sensorbase Client.