PhET Progress Report

Sam Reid

Feb 19, 2009

An online version of this report is available here.

Here’s a pie chart representation of the time distribution.

IOM

· Discussions and meetings regarding statistics, updates, testing, testing spreadsheets, deployment scenarios, installer updates

· English JAR and JNLP files have _en before suffix now

· Fixes for updater build process

Ladybug

· Started on Aphid Maze

Build Process

· Build process can now build and deploy:

1. Flash sims

2. phet-updater (with its 7kb size)

3. Translation utility

4. Itself

· Added JAR generation on spot in Java

1. can run locally without having to deploy sims

2. no database access required to identify sim flavors

3. no jnlp files required to identify languages

4. JAR generator is versioned, and deployable as a JAR with the PBG

5. significantly smaller implementation (130 lines in one file)

1. Java support for properties file, instead of 3rd party support

2. Constants are shared with phetcommon to simplify refactoring

Misc

· Batch Deploy: initial support, still needs testing, cleanup and preparation for alpha deploy for Sim Testing

· Burst Test: wrote a test harness for JO to use for testing burst capacity of statistics

Questions

· Deploy alpha sim test with possibly broken statistics+updates features, or wait, or disable?

· Can submit-message.php and phet-query.php be generalized? What if we replace their implementations with Java or other non php implementation?

· Who will be testing the common features? How much time will they contribute?

· What about testing updates in isolation, then deploying beta tests with updates but no statistics? (or vice versa) This could break down and simplify the problem.

· What about group-oriented testing instead of (or in addition to) document-oriented testing?

Upcoming Work

· Issues for 3/31/2009 Milestone

· Motion series suite, including Ladybug 2D

· Make spot JAR generation optional

· Move new JAR generator to tigercat; improve console output and performance?

· For details, See ticket report "Sam R: Report" here and the google doc linked above