[hobbit] xml configs

[Henrik Stoerner]

On Mon, May 21, 2007 at 07:24:58PM +0200, Henrik Stoerner wrote:
> On Mon, May 21, 2007 at 11:08:12AM -0400, Galen Johnson wrote:
> 
> > I know this would be a rather significant change but have you 
> > considered switching hobbit to use xml based config files?  
> 
> No, I haven't considered this.
> 
> To make me do such a conversion, however, I would have to see some
> genuine benefit in doing so. And right now, I don't see any - even 
> though I spent a couple of days last week learning a lot about XML.
> Just to be able to tick off the "XML configurable ?" checkbox 
> doesn't count much in my world :-)

Just remembered one point that I would like to make: I am not against
using XML in Hobbit, on the contrary it could make a lot of sense for 
Hobbit to provide more of the data it has in XML form. There is already
the "hobbitdxboard" command that gives you the current status in XML,
and other kind of data could well be provided by Hobbit via XML, e.g. 
so some 3rd party application can query Hobbit for the configuration of 
a monitored host. Using XML for this is a no-brainer - making data 
available in a standardized form is exactly why XML exists.

I'm working on making the bb-hosts file be needed only on the central
Hobbit server, so when you have multiple Hobbit servers running network
tests, you need not distribute or maintain the bb-hosts file on multiple
servers. Among other things, this requires that an application can
query the Hobbit server for the configuration of one or more hosts; and
I can see several reasons to make this interface available in some XML
form - even if Hobbit itself might not use the XML version of the data.


Regards,
Henrik