Solar Decathlon Home Management System 2.0

As the final project for my software development class, our team was assigned to create a mockup of our system using HTML, Wicket, and CSS.  We based our project off of the Balsamique mockups that we had previously done.  Fortunately for our group, our design was fairly simple to implement, and had alot of reoccuring elements like the menu and side bars.  We were able to design a base page wich incorporated the main menu bar, and built all of our other pages off of it.  This project, which threw us into the deep end of web development, brought me a great respect for HTML and Wicket.  However, it also made me wonder why in the word CSS was invented.  It seems strange that anyone would want all of the elements in their webpage to be exactly the same.  I found myself time and time again having to trudge through several hundred lines of obscure code to find the one line that was messing up my child page.  Working with BluePrint CSS was painful, and many of the overriding <Style> tags that should have modified the main CSS file, didn't.  It seems like it would have been much easier just to define each page individually.  In my short-lived experience, I find that CSS is painful, but necessary to render content across different browsers and operating systems. 

With respect to how our group managed the development of our project, I can happily say that it was a breeze.  Our team started a bit late, but once we allocated the workload, our project chugged along nicely.  Our only hang up occured when we realized that our software environments were slightly inconsistent, but that was a simple fix.  Overall, I find the combination of Google Project Hosting, Subversion and Eclipse made this project very straightforward. 

All in all, our project went very smoothly, but in hindsight, I wish we had started a litte sooner.  For the most part, our team worked at a fairly regular pace on the project, however there were a few key items that had to be completed before other members could proceed.  In particular, the creation of our "base page" (off of which every other page was built) created a hang up in both the development and planning of our child pages.  Starting a little earlier might have prevented alot of lost sleep.
 


One of the goals of our project was to satisfy "The Three Prime Directives of Software Engineering".


The Three Prime Directives of Software Engineering:
1. The system successfully accomplishes a useful task.


Our system does indeed accomplish a useful task.  It both illustrates the final product and sets a working foundation for the next phase of development for our system.  Ultimatently, the system will be used to control the home that will be entered into the Solar Decathlon competition.  Until then, the system is useful in providing a more formalized simulation of what the final product will be.  This gives the clients, in this case the Solar Decathlon Team, something to interact with and lets them provide us with highly detailed feedback.  This in turn lets us, the developers, align our product with their specific needs.

2. An external user can successfully install and use the system.

Our current system is extremely easy to use, requiring only one command line statement to execute.  A user simply has to download the distribution jar, and then type "java -jar wicket-solardecathlon1.2.jar".  The project site also features a "User Guide" in its wiki section, which provides step by step instructions for installation and execution.

3. An external developer can successfully understand and enhance the system.

Our system is built in a consistent and elegant fashion, making it easy to understand and modify.  While every system has a learning curve, our system is fairly simple, and very straightforward.  All of our pages are built off of one "base page", which provides the basic background and menu bar.  After that, each individual page has its own package and implements a specific page.  Each package contains all of the resources needed to render its own page. 
The documentation included with the code is fairly straightforward, and the variable names for various elements help to identify their use.  The code is also very uniform in style and function, making it easy to read and understand. 

Project site: http://code.google.com/p/solar-decathlon-teamhawaii-2/