Greensmart Ver. 2.0

Greensmart Ver. 2.0 saw some major changes as well as some minor changes from the 1.0 version. We fixed the bugs found in version 1.0 and improved the overall look and feel of the website.

What does this do?

This project has two options. You can view the stoplight page or view the chart page. Should the user go to the stoplight page then they will find that there is a stoplight there that displays the current level of carbon intensity with a specific message to the color. If the user chooses to go to the chart page then they can select a date or a range of dates and the data will be displayed in chart form.

Changes:

Originally we only had one page which took a date and then printed the resulting carbon intensity, carbon intensity level and the hour in a long chart that didn't fit on a screen. However in version 2.0 we changed that. Now there is a home page where you can choose to go to either the chart page (which displays carbon intensity data) or the stop light page which takes the current computer time and calculates the carbon level then displays the results on a stop light with a corresponding message depending on the color of the level. On the chart page we now use Google Charts to graph the carbon intensity and the hour and use background colors to show the level of the intensity instead of printing everything out in a table. Also the user is now able to choose to graph either the carbon intensity or the energy for a given time period.

We also changed the look of the page by changing the background color to the color white and also added "web 2.0" buttons and a new logo that we designed ourselves. Also we created a contacts page and now all of the pages have links to all of the other pages of our project which makes navigation around the site a breeze. To further improve the look of the page we incorporated the date picker to the chart page so now the user has the option to visually pick out which date or which date ranges of data they wish to view.

In addition to the date picker the other extra credit option that we choose to implement was the nice urls. This eliminates the strange wicket generated urls and replaces them with text which gives the project a more professional look to it.

Lessons Learned:

Through this project I was able to gain basic knowledge of Wicket and how it interacts with both Java and HTML. Another thing that I learned was while the project might meet the specifications (like our ver. 1.0), the user interfaces must be easy and friendly to use without too much clutter and a lot of intuitiveness for ease of use for any user no matter how computer literate they are. Lastly I realize that had the option been available it would have been better for us to specialize in certain areas of the project. For example one person does the HTML work, one person does the Wicket and one one person works on the Google charts, ect. Specialization would have allowed for less errors as well as a faster production time.