June 2008 Presentation Video Released

The video of last year's presentation at the MIT EurekaFest is now up on MIT TechTV. This represents the culmination of last year's work, and it's exciting to have it available to the public after so many requests. Watching the video has also been a source of inspiration for the current team. The team is re-energized, and has ambitions to produce even more for both local gardeners, and the worldwide horticulture industry. After a few months researching the technologies behind the Garden Consultant, we are ready to move into a new phase of development. We are directly applying new technologies in innovative ways in order to bring the Garden Consultant into a state where any gardener would be excited to utilize our invention. You can watch the video on MIT TechTV at http://techtv.mit.edu/videos/1690-saratoga-springs-high-school-inventeam-presentation

Thomas Hays
Project Manager for the 2008-2009 Saratoga Springs InvenTeam

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AJAX Data Entry

Over the past few days, we have been working on getting the data entry page to run smoother and have some cool features. One such feature is a drop-down menu in HTML which contains the names you've entered for different zones. We got this working in Perl, and then got rid of it to do it over again in AJAX. The Perl required refreshing the page to interface with the Database, whereas AJAX can communicate with the Database without refreshing or reloading the page. So now it only has a few more bugs to work out and it will be ready. It also adds a lot of functionality to the site and really makes it have a more professional feel.
This is also the first implementation of AJAX that we've made, so it has a lot of potential. Many more pages may start being in AJAX, such as possibly Log-in and Register.


This is a video from last year, and may be incorporated into the website. Any feedback on it would be much appreciated.

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Inventeam Presentation

We are almost ready for our presentation to Andrea Mann. We went through a long Power Point presentation for all the teams working on the Garden Consultant, as well as the teams doing independent projects in EDD.

The website has a new background up which we think is very clean. The changing season background has been scrapped, as we decided that it looked too cluttered with it. The website is also now capable of inputting Zone Data to the website, with multiple zones for each user. Now we need to have the user be able to access all of his or her previously saved zones and edit them. We hope to have this working soon.

The Google Web Toolkit site (Web 2.0) is interfacing with the database, and looks really cool. However, that project is on vacation so we can focus on getting the main site working.

More updates are on the way!

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Garden Consultant 2.0 Beta

We have just gotten back from our two week holiday break today, and already have some exciting new ideas. We plan on using the Google Web Toolkit to give the website a very cool, smooth feel. Google Web Toolkit uses AJAX and has a lot of cool features that will also make the website faster.

Check out some examples here:

http://gwt.google.com/samples/Showcase/Showcase.html

In other news, we are approaching the presentation date for Andrea Mann. All of the groups will have their own video similar to the one showed below for the Perl Team. This video explains the use of the Perl scripting language in the construction of the website.

One of the art teachers across the hall is doing some pretty cool stuff, and he asked us to put a link up for his blog. There's a really cool picture up of Grand Central Terminal done piece by piece. He's also going to be having students post in the near future. http://aquinostudioart.blogspot.com/.

More Updates on the way!

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