YQLGradeDist

[cameronellis]

This commit contains code that scrapes grade distribution data from the cape website. Compared to the other source for grade distribution data which is currently outdated.

Development Notes:

• It's 76 lines shorter
• It's easier to read (in my opinion)
• Uses YQL (Yahoo Query Language - https://developer.yahoo.com/yql/): This greatly simplifies the data scraping process and will make the app easier to maintain in the future. It will also help the performance of the app
• Replaced Http with Https (see: https://www.httpvshttps.com/): This makes the app (slightly) faster and more secure
• The code is documented with javadoc conventions
• W and GPA labels have been removed: W is not a value in cape and GPA is already given under the CAPE column
• Synchronous XMLHttpRequest on the main thread is deprecated because of its detrimental effects to the end user's experience: is still present like before.
• There are some professors it's unable to get grade distribution data for. This is because of the difference in professor names on cape and the variables teacher.lname and teacher.fname (e.g. Ilkay Altintas, vs Ilkay Callaf). This is a problem we've addressed before and should not be very difficult to handle in the future

[j-delaney]

Awesome! I'm gonna be looking over this the next few days and making comments. Thanks for doing this :)

[cameronellis]

By the way, is there a way for you to run the application? Wouldn't think you have credentials to log in to tritonlink now that you've graduated

[cameronellis]

Okay, made the changes to the commit in accordance with your comments

And you're welcome! This tool appears to getting a lot of good use by students at UCSD. Would be a shame for it to no longer be maintained!

[cameronellis]

Okay, updated it. It didn't take too long to tweak, thankfully.

Can't say I like it as much visually because of how nested it is. As for the consistency part. I was planning on refactoring the other two files as well. And even putting in a function in another .js class to cut out the repeated code

Thoughts?

[j-delaney]

Refactoring sounds great! Because the extension is taking on a lot more complexity I think it's definitely appropriate to have a refactor

[cameronellis]

I don't think it's taken on a lot more complexity myself. What's next is definitely making sure the right names go into the query to get the data back.

How best should we do that? store the information in a long if, else if, else blocks? Use something like MySQL? Store the professor data in a server somewhere?