In the final week of class I find myself going over what I’ve accomplished and learned from this class. I’ve learned how to read HTML 5, not necessarily code in it however. I’ve learned Javascript and how to manage a real life software development project as well as how to interact with others in an environment where there are multiple coders. And I’ve also been able to boost my troubleshooting abilities with programming.
Over the past few weeks I have been looking into getting the swipe function to work with our part of the app and ending up trying out a few different coding techniques, none of which seemed to work much to my dismay. However in the past week I was able to find a good “floor plan” of how to set it up in our environment, and we were able to take that floor plan and fit it into the slideshow and finally we saw some progress. It wasn’t much progress at first, but Sean was able to sit down and painstakingly tweak the code and finally got it working the way we need to; aside from the gallery swipe. Some real progress has been made, and now we just have one minor thing left to do, get that gallery swipe-able.
This past week didn’t entail much especially since the project seems to be winding down. At this point it is just code review / bug fixes and optimization for the slideshow. We seem to be pretty much done with the slideshow as of now, since James caught the error in why our results didn’t replicate correctly on the server (case sensitive issue). We just need to put in the correct pictures when they come and get the swipe function working and we should be good! That’s my standpoint on this, lets see if the others agree! If not, then updates will be forthcoming.
Hello all,
This week I worked on and off with Sean on trying to move the picture finder to the bottom of the screen, we made slight progress at first but were later proved to be unsuccessful. We may end up needing a little extra help on this, even if its just for brainstorming ideas on how to implement it in the code. Next, we need to figure out why when we try to test on the server, we just get an infinite loading bar.
This week I was tasked to look into a way to notify our web server whenever changes are made in our Github repository, so that we may automatically pull and sync the new code in order to update our application. I found out that this can be done using Github’s Post-Receive Hooks. The first step that has to be done in this is to update our Administrators Github settings page, under the WebHooks URL section and update that section with the URL to our webserver. Once a commit is made to github they send JSON encrypted script to the webserver, based on a template in Ruby that contains the payload data.
If I understand things correctly we can either go about it in the previous manner, or use a slightly different approach using an SSH key.. I will go over this later when we all meet in class..
Not much was done on my part during the past week, I mostly just played the waiting game while our WSU IT guys configure the server for us, since we need that in order to progress further. Originally my group had planned on doing it ourselves since most of us have a good amount of experience using VMWare, but that just wasn’t to be. More coming once we get the server!
One of my group members suggested earlier in the week that we look into another method of deploying our database rather than hosting the database server side, and it looks like this might be able to be made a reality with correct utilization of the Javascript File Reader. As the name suggests it allows text to be read from an HTML-5 based site or storage location, however it looks like it is possible for it to read photos as well..but in most cases it seems to be a resource hog. Based on my preliminary findings i would have to say that hosting the application server side with a SQL back end would still be the most efficient way to go.
This week I researched if it is possible to store images in a SQLite database (since it is different from a SQL database), and I found that it is in fact possible to store them. After some digging I found that the general consensus is that the best way to do so is to store the reference to the images inside the database, instead of the actual images themselves. I was able to find a few tutorials online and a few different coding examples (including how to store the images in the application directory of the iOS). Here is a link to the most “complete” tutorial.
http://www.iphonesdkarticles.com/2009/02/sqlite-tutorial-saving-images-in.html
So far our team has decided to look into the possibility of running our app for the Worcester Art Museum on top of a SQL Lite database, after doing some research into how to use and manage a SQL Lite database it seems like it would be a decent idea, so far our concern with this is whether or not PhoneGap will support this type of database. I’ve done some research on the commands for creating and managing the database and it seems like I will be able to pick this up very quickly.
In addition to my research on the database I progressed with my learning of Javascript and ventured into the world of Objects; which thankfully are very similar to Java objects, at least in my mind.
Since meeting with Tim and Katrina I got a better overall understanding of the project and what it will contain, as a class we were asked to familiarize ourselves with Javascript, CSS, and HTML 5. I chose to start looking into Javascript since then and so far I have a good overall understanding of its syntax and how to program inside the language.
I’m hoping to complete my research on it and my training involving it soon, and hope to be able to work on the Javascript side of this project, even though I will soon start my research into HTML 5 and CSS.
CS:401 