Cross posted from the SensorHub.org

The past year has been full of interesting learning experiences from discovering how much work still needs to be done to integrate graphing with Drupal's Views module, how Javascript sucks for graphing due to client-side performance issues, how hard it can be to process large amounts of data using Drupal on a shared hosting environment, and how we've failed to get other parties involved with the development of this module.

I have 4 ideas on how we can do better.

1) Generate graphs server side using pCharts thus bypassing any browser/bandwidth limitations

I've played with pCharts already and have to say it would solve a lot of our headaches to start using it as opposed to any other javascript based graphing library. We lose the ability to "dynamically interact" with the data loaded but this sacrifice I'm sure is worth having something that works reliably, accurately, and knows practically no limitations. Their first example is a time/temperature scatter plot http://wiki.pchart.net/.

2) Make the Sensor Hub module Kit compliant and develop for an existing install profile (like Open Atrium) thus making it much easier for people to install Sensor Hub and also save us a bunch of UI work.

Sensor Hub Kit compliance means that we would be able to reliably install it on any Kit compliant Drupal install and expect it to work without having to worry about mismatched regions, a lengthy install process, and many other reasons. Open Atrium is a Kit compliant Drupal install profile that has 98% of the dependencies for the Sensor Hub module already met and would make getting started with the Sensor Hub module much easier for new installs. So instead of downloading and installing 14 separate modules, the user would just have to download and install Open Atrium and Sensor Hub. This also saves us some UI/IA work on questions like, "how do users navigate to all of their separate Sensor Board nodes?" I have a plan of how Sensor Hub can fit nicely into the Spaces OG framework present in Open Atrium, Drupal Commons, and other Drupal Install Profiles. This also means we can reliably use other Kit compliant features like the Notebook in parallel with our Sensor Hub module installs.

3) Recommend some minimum server requirements so we can focus on getting what we have working now and worry about how to get this running on a cheap shared hosting environment later.

OMG so many headaches from processing limitations. I need to get this variable out of my way so I can focus on getting something productive working. For the Cloacina install I'm going to look into getting it up on the Amazon cloud.

4) Publish some documentation on how to get hardware communicating with Sensor Hub.

I know we must already have some documentation on this. Lets get links to that documentation prominently placed on the Sensor Hub project page on Drupal.org and also placed on the front page of this Atrium. Can someone post what they might have so far in the blog?