Tuesday, August 4, 2009

GSoC: Hackystat July 27-August 3

This week:

Has not been as productive as I needed it to be. Mostly, it has been consumed with Ivy frustrations. I will be trucking along and realize that I need another library, and have to stop and futz with the Ivy stuff until it works. This week, that also involved updating Ant, since apparently the version of Ant running on this release of Ubuntu is two years old. In a couple of the cases I was having difficulty figuring out which jar I would need. For instance, I needed the SensorBaseClient class, but I didn't feel like it was a good idea to have the hackystat client dependent on the whole sensorbase. So, I looked at how the eclipse sensor did it, and saw that the eclipse sensor pulls the sensorshell jar, and assumed that it was all wrapped up in the sensorshell jar. I copied that little bit from the sensorshell build file and put it in the build file for my project, ran it.... Break. Fail. Lose. This did not make sense to me. So I downloaded the sensorshell and tried to build it. Fail, but because of Ant.

In the end, I downloaded the new releases and built everything from the source, so all of the necessary jars would be in my cache. I didn't experience any problems building the system from source, though I do have a question about the ant -f jar.build.xml publish-all command. Does it only build the projects that are immediately dependent upon the project you are building? Or does it cascade? I mean, does it follow the chain rule?

Like, if project x depends on project y which depends on projext z, and you invoke the publish all on project z, does it only build project y, or does it also build project x? My working understanding is that it only builds project y. It would be super nice if it also build project x.

So, while I love Ivy a lot for installation purposes, and for downloading and organizing purposes, writing something to use Ivy as you go is an enormous pain, particularly if something is not already in the roundup.

Other library related concerns. The sensorshell jar seems to contain pretty much the entire sensorbase. Why? It seems like I tried to avoid a sensorbase dependency and ended up with one anyway.

Anyway, here's a preview of the app. Note that where it currently says, "Item 1.... " etc on the list will actually be a list of the user's projects in the SensorBase. This is just the preview of the GUI.



also with tool tip texts.





Not that this will run right now. Have two more libraries to ivy-ify.


Visualizations:

These are the network visualization libraries I'm experimenting with.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/touchgraph/

http://jung.sourceforge.net/

I am really excited about touchgraph.


Splitting the Project:

This is going to have to wait until I've finished writing the code, more or less. It's enough trouble to update one set of build files. I don't look forward to having to update 4 or so.


Sprinting to the finish!

The firm pencil's down date is in just two weeks' time. Things that need to get done before then:

1. meaningful registration process, by which a user can link the email address they used to register with the sensorbase to all of their various socnet stuff, so that I can limit who accesses the data in an appropriate way.

2. useful visualizations and initial analysis tools
Other than displaying the network and allowing the user to navigate through it in a sort of physical manipulate-y way (touchgraph!), this will probably also include some summarization of the other information in the network. I don't, however, want to simply mirror what the dailyprojectdata and telemetry services already do. Still thinking on what that will be.

then, once that is done, splitting the project into smaller, manageable chunks, and making sure my documentation is nice, etc.

Also, on a personal note, I graduated from college this week.

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