Started this blog a month into a 2 month internship w/ IBM... better late than never?
Here's the problem I see with what I'm tasked with, but first, before problem, background.
I'm currently tasked with providing visualized analytics on a cloudant data store that has test metrics data from a test web site for a new initiative from CDS (CLOUD DATA SERVICES). Most of the data are just documents that have arbitrary values for each key. This data has been accumulated throughout the development process so to say that the data has any sort of real life application is obviously not the case.
How I've implemented this task?
tough answer - as it turns out, a guy from dev advocacy has been building a d3 couchapp (remember, cloudant is built on couchdb) and I could "leverage" (kill me now) the work he's done and just auto-create some views and dump it into our cloudant instance. I followed the readme and got it pushed and was given a nice little URL to click on to see my first couchapp...
then I went to the page in IBM Firefox (IBM has their own firefox?) and well, the first problem was that the UI was a mess. charts running off the page, text on top of text, the whole kittin' kabootle. the second problem was that only 2 (bar graph and pie chart) of the 4 (bar graph, pie chart, line graph, and table) types of charts worked. So naturally, I took a peek at app.js...
APP.JS WAS A NIGHTMARE.
APP.JS was not production ready. app.js and the rest of the code was prototype code... so I started fixing it. Fixing the UI, getting the charts to work. finished some of this, but not completely. talked with team leader? what did he say? he said now try to DECOUPLE THE COUCHAPP FROM THE UI/D3 ANALYTICS. ok, first of all.... couchapp is a css/js/html wrapper that ties your web app nicely together in a cute little json document and then pumps it into your db for HIGH SCALABILITY ACROSS CLUSTERED NODES... but I didn't know any of that then, so I said "sure I'll give it a shot!" and as it turned out... COUCHAPP WAS HIGHLY INTEGRATED INTO THE REST OF THE HORRIBLE D3 JS/CSS/HTML APP THAT DEV ADVOCACY MADE. I couldn't do it, just couldn't.
So then team leader suggests I try to do it myself. SURE THING, BRO. I CAN DO THIS.
i can't, i definitely can't.
well, I started by creating a node.js app. I figured that I needed to create some sort of local web page (which would then later deploy to our org in IBM BLUEMIX that is already running the proof of concept UI EVENT -> KAFKA -> CLOUDANT pipeline) that had a couple of charts and a bit of data to sprinkle in. I figured I could use the cloudant/node.js library (link below) and then connect in D3 for some pretty charts, who the hell doesn't love pretty charts, and d3 is good at it. I'd toss in some bootstrap (also maybe dust?) and I'd be in good shape. I could be naive, but shit, i'm trying.
now it's July 15th, been working on this for the four-ish days. right now all I can do in my app (called it "d3-cloudant) is connect to the cloudant instance and dump all of the docs in a view into a cute little variable I called response (it's the response from cloudant or something? I don't know... if you're thinking bad thoughts about my naming conventions then f off).
So I started doing this on a monday, last monday actually, jul. 6th. now it's jul 15th and I'm not much of anywhere and struggling to figure out how everything works, how to use them, how to put a project together, and how to get it to work ,,,,,,,, or something? damn, bad headache.
AVANT-garde dev
easy answer (obviously) - I haven't really
WILL WRITE MORE POSTS LATER ON WHAT I DID IN THE PREVIOUS MONTH BEFORE THIS (i.e. JUNE 8th to JULY 5th).