Ideas for Using the WeatherEase Toolkit

• Report Translation Services --
  Make some classes that can turn a WeatherReport into some other interesting format, such as XML, WAP, synthesized speech, a pager message, or whatever. Use the new classes along with the supplied Toolkit classes to provide a customized weather-reporting service. Some of the more interesting areas involve presenting and delivering reports to customers who aren't necessarily connected directly to the internet, or who may have unconventional data-presentation devices.

• Weather-Triggered Gadgets --
  Use my Gadget Toolkit to make a Gadget representing the value of a single reading like temperature, humidity, hourly precipitation, or thunderstorms. Then define an alarm-range using the Gadget Toolkit classes Range and TriggerOnAlarm so the appearance of a particular range or value in the weather gadget triggers some other Gadget, such as an X10 Gadget representing an attic fan, an evaporative cooler, a heater, or some other device.

  You could also combine the alarm-range capability of a weather-reading Gadget with ideas like Report Translation Services, to produce capabilities like an automatic telephone or pager message being triggered when the temperature falls below some threshold.

• Graphical Weather Watcher --
  Rewrite the Weather Watcher demo program to present WeatherReports using graphical elements. For example, use JPEG images rather than words to indicate sky-cover. Once you have the basic graphical elements in place, it should be straightforward to add more elements corresponding to the various readings contained in a WeatherReport.

  Another idea is to simply rewrite the Weather Watcher demo to use Swing components and pluggable look-and-feels, but remain pretty much the same in overall visual design.

• Weather Logger --
  Write a simple program that collects reports over a long period of time and writes the readings you want to a log file, say in tab-separated text form. Then read and plot the data using a conventional spreadsheet or charting program.

  You can also obtain up to 24 hours of all NOAA/NWS weather reports (cycles), and run them through a file-reader that builds WeatherReports. Then do whatever you want with the WeatherReports to make the log files.

• Your Weather Station --
  Create a ReportBuilder that gets readings from a Dallas Semiconductor One-Wire weather station, or some other personal weather station connected to your computer. Then publish the data as HTML using a Java servlet, or turn it into your own METAR report, or whatever.

• Decode More Data Formats --
  Write implementations of ReportBuilder to decode other weather-data formats.

  Or write better implementations of the supplied METAR TokenDecoder classes.

  Or write individual TokenDecoders for any of the METAR fields I omitted.

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