Week 5

Last week there was a pitching event at Demola. Each team gave a one minute pitch about their project to the other teams. Chris gave our teams pitch and he managed to pitch our project into 15 seconds, which was the shortest and one of the best pitches of the event.

We also had a meeting with our client and they decided to have a meeting with Mikko Kurunsaari from Gurux to get more support for our project. They had a meeting later in the week and we will be getting more help from Gurux. The meeting also made the project more clear on some parts, but it also gave us some questions that we hadn't had time to think about.

On Friday there was also a Windows phone 7 hackathlon that me and Sunil took part in. We did some basic applications for the phone and got some useful information for developing for the Windows phone 7. This might not be useful for our current project, but it was a great hackathlon.

Weekly hours:
Chris - 16
Risto - 14
Sunil - 15
Tuomas - 4

Configuring gurux

After our meeting with the client we kept trying to get gurux working and made node.js plan B. Gurux will make the rest of the project much easier if we get it working. It will handle the data transactions and serving custom pages for the end user. We are getting help from Mikko Kurunsaari from Gurux and hopefully we will have gurux up and runnig very soon.

We started looking at how gurux handles custom pages and we will need to use asp.net, so we are spending some of our time figuring out how the custom pages are going to work. Hopefully we can use gurux to serve the custom pages and that we can customize them to fit our clients needs.

Chris and Tuomas are going to start making some designs for the user interface and me and Sunil are going to keep working on gurux.

Weekly hours:
Chris - 14
Risto - 13
Sunil - 16
Tuomas - 14

Node.js as a Web Server

Node.js is a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications. It uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices. We think it may be perfect for our needs.

Our project involves the real-time aggregation of data from disparate nodes. We need a solution that is capable of taking lots of data and storing it to a database, for later processing. Node.js does this well!

We have set up a test server on Risto's local machine and we have requested server space from Demola to test Node.js. So far it appears to be working well but until we start testing it with thousands of requests we will not know if it is capable of handling the extreme amount of data we have to send it. The client made clear that their servers will have to handle potentally tens of thousands of clients communicating with it at once.


Weekly hours:
Chris - 14.5
Risto - 18
Sunil - 13.25
Tuomas - 15

GuruX Device Management

The client asked to see if GuruX will meet the needs of device management and data aggregation. On paper, it should. It claims to do what we need:

• One reading application handles several protocols at the same time. Data collecting becomes easy and economical. Our products are totally independent of the monitored device type and the used connection type.
• We unify all parameters before collecting data. Raw data becomes high quality, and no data clean-up is needed.

We've been attempting to set up GuruX to handle device management for our project. Unfortunately, it's been quite a painful process. We have even spoken to the Demola group that is dedicated solely to GuruX and they have yet to get the software working. This has been frustrating and worrisome because our project timeline is tight and we are still unsure if GuruX will meet our needs.

The front-end team has been busy writing the project plan and thinking about interfaces while the back-end guys troubleshoot GuruX.

Weekly hours:
Chris - 16
Risto - 17
Sunil - 20.5
Tuomas - 16