[GSoC09] Devcathlon UI and other random thoughts

Past week:
This week was more targeted in testing and running Devcathlon's game events. I got a chance to look over a few of the events as well as make improvements to the user interface. I honestly had more fun with the UI, since it gave me the chance to be creative. Also this past week was mostly angled towards packaging for GSoC's mid-term release.

UI Improvements:
The first time you visit Devcathlon, you are presented a functional, yet not very pleasing UI that included a conglomerate of panels and links that semi-worked correctly. I decided that if I needed to start somewhere, then it had to be this very initial page. From here, I devised a new scoreboard, that updates frequently as the visitor sits back and watches things change on screen. It's more dynamic, much more intuitive and incredibly fun to look at.
In the process of creating this component, there are some things that were notably noted for future reference and eventually documented.
Dependencies:
Wicket's date-time package extension requires a tool called, Joda. It took a while to figure out the reason why the page could not initialize when coding a date-time picker with the following:

private final Date date = new Date();
...
DateTextField dateTextField = new DateTextField("dateTextField", new PropertyModel(this, "date"), new StyleDateConverter("-S", true));
...
form.add(dateTextField);
dateTextField.add(new DatePicker());
...

Igor was quick to notify someone else with the similar problem by concluding that it would be easier to use a project management tool, called Maven. It's probably the most reasonable thing to do in the future since Wicket projects are now more geared towards using this to properly manage project builds, documentation and resolving dependencies. However, Devcathlon is quite comfortable now in just using Ant as a building tool. Ant serves to be flexible and less standardized than Maven, yet Maven does enforce good practices in folder structures and offers other great project organizations.
** (07-2009) UPDATE - All projects for Hackystat will be switched to integrating with IVY soon.**

This week:
- Resolve issues with mapping JAXB classes via HyperJAXB. (Complete DB)
- Setup and install Devcathlon to public (test) server
- Test game events and pull live data
- Incorporate new UI

Other notes:
Since other tools were needed to properly build the project through our continuous integration, via Hudson, I didn't want to risk failing a build. I'm keeping things in-house with my mentors until Monday when we set up a proper test server where I could install exactly what I need and want on it. Currently testing will be done by one user (myself) and eventually by my fellow Hackystat GSoCers.
I also mentioned earlier last week about switching to Netbeans 6.7, but my project mentor, Philip suggested that I should stick with Eclipse since we currently only have one sensor that supports Eclipse. On that note, this would make for a great plugin idea for Netbeans to support sending Hackystat sensor data via the IDE. Hopefully someone with the time could venture this avenue.