Introduction

Its the Release Notes! Basically each release we let you know what we fixed, what we added, or even the things we've removed, if any. This lets you know what are accomplishments were for this release.

Current Release

This current release will probably be the last in a while since our team will be finishing the ICS 414 course. Hopefully the next class will pick up where we left off or we will find time to work on this more later. But for now we need to turn something in and document the accomplishments we've made.

To start off, we've actually spent the last two month of the semester working on a user interface that was based off the HackyStat Project Browser. We used Wicket as a Java web framework and tried to create a easy to use, intuitive user interface but due to design flaws and first building the user interface in Stripes and then building it in Wicket, we pretty much ran out of time. So there has not been much work on the Ambient Server in the past two months.

And so we turn in this slightly tweaked version of the last AmbientHackystat project. This version mainly has support built in for the web user interface. The main difference is the uiStart method found in the AmbientServer.java file. This method basically starts the Ambient server without loading the configuration from command line. Instead, it takes in a username and password as parameters and searches for a file that matches the username in the user folder under the xml branch of the main project directory.

What this allows us to do is save specific configuration files to a file on hard disk. If there is no configuration file that matches the user name, then a new file is created. The only problem is that this creates a brand new file with no configuration what so ever in it. Thus it causes the server and the user interface to react erratically. We have yet to create a way for it to create a fresh file with some of the essential configuration loaded in, such as the the Devices and the servers to use.

Other then that quick fix, there really isn't much else that is different in this release. But when this file is placed into the lib directory of the web user interface, the user interface can run, granted you give it a correct configuration file, and we can edit the Trigger/Action Pairs without having to edit the XML by hand.