This application serves as the primary user interface into the sam_info_server. It's mission is to provide the information in a manner that is highly configurable and easily digestible to the user. To this end the application consists of several pieces of functionality.Status 11/24/1998: While it is true that these pieces exist in the current prototype, they have not yet been restructured to be loosely coupled. Currently, as an artifact of Visual Cafe, the system has these components bound into the TestFrame class directly.
- Information acquisition
- Graphing
- Textual presentation
The system is fed from the sam_info_server and the CORBA name service. The sam_info_server does the bulk of the data retrieval and formatting of information relating to the sam system. This includes retrieving information from the database and parsing log files generated by the sam online components. For more information see the sam_info_server home page.Sam_admin also gathers information from the CORBA name server. In this case we are using the ORBacus name service and we use that information to do simple queries on the active components in the system. This functionality will be increased in future releases to include deregistration or perusal of components.
Status 11/24/1998: Moving into the next phase not much will change in information acquisition. There will surely be more sam_info_server methods invoked, but the design of the system should remain essentailly unchanged. The one possible exception would be the implementation of a more event driven model. In this case the methods invoked would probably remain the same, but the model would be more push driven than pull. Better advantage will be taken of the ORBacus interface repository in future revision as well.
The information gathered in the acquisition portion is fed into the gui portion of the system. Graphing is where most of this data ends up.The graphing portion shows how different metrics compare to each other using the KLG groups jchart product. This product allows for information to be fed into their beans and displayed to the user. The two main graphs deal with file throughputs to consumers and byte throughputs to sam.
There is an additional graph that shows the throughput by way of a set of pictures of the system components (robot, sam, cache and consumers) at the highest level. The total throughput is displayed on a connection between the different pieces of the system.
Status 11/24/1998: This is really the heart of sam_admin. Almost all information gathered is presented in a graph and, now that we are done with the prototype, this is an area that will see active development in the future. Specifically targeted is changing graphs to be essentially blank slates. A user will then be able to paste metrics onto a graph. This would allow, for example, a graph that showed the file transfer rate and byte rate from the robot to sam to be shown on the same graph. A user could construct a number of these graphs and arrange them on the screen to suit their needs.
The textual presentation of data includes the tree graphs that have been developed to reveal a heirarchacal view of the system. There are two such trees. One contains all the sam pieces in the system. The other contains all names that have been registered with the CORBA name service.Status 11/24/1998: The system explorer (i.e. the tree that let's a user view the sam components) will be ehanced to include the files that a consumer node has consumed. It will also allow for different types of information to be displayed based on the currently selected node type. There is also lots of information in the database that might be useful to display that is not currently being retrieved.
The name explorer will be enhanced to allow for the deregistration of a name and the viewing of the interface associated with a name (for ORBacus interfaces only).