Over the period of time I was working towards the Apps For Energy submission I found that my main development environment Pharo had pushed our a new version 1.4. My project was being done in 1.3 and I did not want to be distracted by making version adjustments at that time so I ignored it. But today I gave it a try.
Here is my experience. I downloaded the One Click 1.4 and created loaded my Green Button App from the Montecello sources. It took quiet a while for Seaside to load and I have a Metacello problem in my Configuration where the work around is just to load the project a second time and run a few initialization methods. Most of that went smoothly. I should have set the deprecation handling to don't bother me because the none of the deprecated methods were from my code. There were deprecated methods from Zinc and from Seaside. When I ran seaside /status it raised a number of deprecation warnings around accessing information related to the VM, I fixed all these points and wrote out a package with those fixes.
It is now time to explore all the new additions and find our about the "Ring" code I have heard about but don't have a clue about. So maybe I will report on that in about a week.
Saturday, May 19, 2012
Green Tech Grind has an overview of the Green Button Apps and I missed the submission deadline. I think it is unlikely that my entry would have been the energy killer app everyone is hoping for.
I reviewed about 12 of the apps and got bored fairly quickly. My concept was to display energy data in a more acessable format. Green Tech makes the criticism about the "shiny graph format" used by most of the entries. I agree that the plot format is largely a lazy display issue, a similar plot was included with the sample data on the Green Button Data page if click the view my data button on the button of the page you will soon see a HighCharts graph of the data. These graphs are only compelling to engineer types like me.
What is needed is a display that communicates to the remainder of the electric bill paying population out there. I will present by design when I get my Green Button Entry finished Real Soon Now, in about a week perhaps next month. If you have Green Button Data you can go to http://greendemo.seasidehosting.st and upload it to the app. The app however needs a few fixes do you will need to hunt for your data in time to see the display.
In my next post I will go through the high level design of the app and how I arrived at that display method.
I reviewed about 12 of the apps and got bored fairly quickly. My concept was to display energy data in a more acessable format. Green Tech makes the criticism about the "shiny graph format" used by most of the entries. I agree that the plot format is largely a lazy display issue, a similar plot was included with the sample data on the Green Button Data page if click the view my data button on the button of the page you will soon see a HighCharts graph of the data. These graphs are only compelling to engineer types like me.
What is needed is a display that communicates to the remainder of the electric bill paying population out there. I will present by design when I get my Green Button Entry finished Real Soon Now, in about a week perhaps next month. If you have Green Button Data you can go to http://greendemo.seasidehosting.st and upload it to the app. The app however needs a few fixes do you will need to hunt for your data in time to see the display.
In my next post I will go through the high level design of the app and how I arrived at that display method.
Friday, May 18, 2012
Deadline passed
I missed the deadline for the apps for energy contest.
This is the first time I have tried a thing like this. Since I am a lone coded I was doing all the work. My app was early alpha and I had basically finished the functional design at 9am this morning. I did a sprint to finish the last feature and really wasn't able to integrate the feature. With an hour left before the submission I got hung up on the producing the video a technical feature. Basically I had gotten the process to work four days ago but I did not document it well enough to reproduce it. So no matter what effort I put into the process I failed the submission because of the lack of technical skill.
What to do next?
I have the app posted on the web http://greendemo.seasidehosting.st I will consider finishing project in my "spare time". I will evaluate the other entries to see if my thoughts and ideas were used by someone else.
There are several things about doing this project in Seaside that need to be considered it a project like this is to be hosted at seasidehosting.st. The most important thing to know is that I could not find how to convert my Pharo image to a VM that was compatible with the VM on seasidehosting.st. I could get an image of seaside to that could run on seaside hosting but in my case the XML libraries on the squeak seaside image were not compatible with that of the Pharo version. I ended up having to backport a series of routines to the squeak version. I got fairly good at writing the compatibility version. The real question is if seasidehosting.st has the mission of promoting seaside and seaside developed on Pharo it seems that seaside hosting is a largely abandoned wasteland abandoned seaside implementations.
The development period was 45 days which is quite short. I felt it was achievable to have a working prototype of this project in that period of time. I learned a lot of technical information about the project and implementation of Smalltalk prototypes. A working knowledge of CSS and Javascript.
I believe my display method has merit. I believe the Pharo development environment also has merit. I think we need to develop tools to port Smalltalk code to the browser javascript environment, since in many cases my Smalltalk code was merely writing javascript to the browser. The odd mixture of html, javascript and css on the browser with a powerful but complex system for the construction of web applications. Seaside in itself is a whole new way of writing html code at least in prototype fashion.
This is the first time I have tried a thing like this. Since I am a lone coded I was doing all the work. My app was early alpha and I had basically finished the functional design at 9am this morning. I did a sprint to finish the last feature and really wasn't able to integrate the feature. With an hour left before the submission I got hung up on the producing the video a technical feature. Basically I had gotten the process to work four days ago but I did not document it well enough to reproduce it. So no matter what effort I put into the process I failed the submission because of the lack of technical skill.
What to do next?
I have the app posted on the web http://greendemo.seasidehosting.st I will consider finishing project in my "spare time". I will evaluate the other entries to see if my thoughts and ideas were used by someone else.
There are several things about doing this project in Seaside that need to be considered it a project like this is to be hosted at seasidehosting.st. The most important thing to know is that I could not find how to convert my Pharo image to a VM that was compatible with the VM on seasidehosting.st. I could get an image of seaside to that could run on seaside hosting but in my case the XML libraries on the squeak seaside image were not compatible with that of the Pharo version. I ended up having to backport a series of routines to the squeak version. I got fairly good at writing the compatibility version. The real question is if seasidehosting.st has the mission of promoting seaside and seaside developed on Pharo it seems that seaside hosting is a largely abandoned wasteland abandoned seaside implementations.
The development period was 45 days which is quite short. I felt it was achievable to have a working prototype of this project in that period of time. I learned a lot of technical information about the project and implementation of Smalltalk prototypes. A working knowledge of CSS and Javascript.
I believe my display method has merit. I believe the Pharo development environment also has merit. I think we need to develop tools to port Smalltalk code to the browser javascript environment, since in many cases my Smalltalk code was merely writing javascript to the browser. The odd mixture of html, javascript and css on the browser with a powerful but complex system for the construction of web applications. Seaside in itself is a whole new way of writing html code at least in prototype fashion.
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