Akira was born and raised on the island of Oahu. After graduating from Kaimuki High School, he went on to pursue a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Engineering at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Akira is also involved with the Hawaii Undergraduate Initiative Program (HUI), where he is able to work with incoming freshman to support and assist them in their transition from high school to college. Akira’s interest outside of academics are hiking, weight training, photography, and spending quality time with family and friends. He hopes to one day pursue a career in STEM in Hawaii.
Home Island: Oahu
Institution when accepted: University of Hawaii at Manoa
Akamai Project: Implementation of Web Widgets using the Ginga Toolkit
Project Site: Subaru Telescope
Mentors: Russell Kackley, Eric Jeschke
Project Abstract:
The Ginga Toolkit is a software toolkit designed for building viewers for scientific image data in Python. Currently, the Ginga Toolkit supports Qt (4&5) and GIMP Toolkit (GTK), but has limited support for web support (HTML5). The Subaru Telescope software engineering team is interested in increasing the support for HTML5 to allow for remote access of current and future applications designed with the Ginga Toolkit, such as the Queue Planner (Qplan) application. In order to increase HTML5 support, we must build web widgets that will lay the foundations for building future complex applications. The systematic reuse of these web widget will allow for the increase of software productivity, shorten software development time, and will produce better quality software applications. These web widgets must be able to mimic their Qt and GTK counterparts, but most importantly, they must be compatible with popular web browsers. To create these web widgets, we must call on an instance of a widget class using the Ginga Toolkit, which will then rely on Python to manipulate HTML5/CSS and JavaScript to display the widget on a web browser. Communication between Python and HTML5/CSS/JS is made possible with the use of Tornado (Python web framework). We have designed and tested each stand-alone widget to ensure that they are fully functional. Currently, we are developing and testing the integration of widgets together to ensure that each widget can be integrated with each other. Having these widgets available will allow for a web based Qplan and will help with future development of web based applications.