This week, I made changes to the AJAX implementation when I realized during testing that it had some bugs. I also used the knowledge about SQLite queries in Django that I learned in past weeks to test whether the implementation works as it should. It is with great delight that I write here that it does indeed work for the required update time of 2 seconds!! The updated AJAX is written keeping in mind our database implementation on the backend side where we are utilizing three tables for the three different data values we are displaying in the frontend. I tested the times in the browser console with time stamps to see whether the data is updating in 2 seconds as desired, and it does as shown in the image below.

I’ve been learning React JS and D3 JS over the past few weeks to be able to implement the barometric needle display better. D3 is very useful to display data in graphical format but React and D3 are both notoriously tricky to learn due to their complexity. My current implementation of the needle is very crude HTML, CSS and lots of self-written Javascript, which while difficult to do still doesn’t provide an elegant design. This is why I’m working on updating the implementation using React JS and D3 JS to give a smoother UI experience.

[Insert image of updated implementation]

Meanwhile, I’ve managed to write an implementation using React to display the vectors representations of the number of people in line as follows.

I’m on schedule at the moment – I did some user tests on 4/22 and based on the feedback received from the users and the TA+Prof, am making changes to the app accordingly. One feedback I thought useful was a feature I thought of implementing earlier – to display whether or not a dining hall is open or close in the menu html page. I added that feature. For the upcoming week, the challenge is to integrate our systems. I do not have prior experience with integrating frontend and backend systems, and will be working with the rest of my teammates on this.