[hobbit] Future of Hobbit

[Hubbard, Greg L]

Damian Conway in "Perl Best Practices" (published by O'Reilly) says
"Don't use XML as your configuration file format.  It may be
human-readable, but it's almost never human-comprehensible, and the
ratio of mark-up to content is vastly too high."  He goes on to argue
that configuration files should use a format that is much more like what
Henrik has implemented in the non-Big-Brother-legacy-format, and
suggests several CPAN modules that Perl programmers can use to parse
these formats in their programs.

I fully agree with this notion -- let's keep Hobbit "XML-free"!

GLH

-----Original Message-----
From: s_aiello at comcast.net [mailto:s_aiello at comcast.net] 
Sent: Wednesday, January 30, 2008 9:06 AM
To: hobbit at hswn.dk
Subject: Re: [hobbit] Future of Hobbit

On Wednesday 30 January 2008, Henrik Stoerner wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 30, 2008 at 07:48:49AM -0500, s_aiello at comcast.net wrote:
> > Henrik Stoerner wrote:
> > > Someone in this thread wrote that he was thinking of implementing 
> > > a new web front-end. That would be fantastic! I would gladly drop 
> > > support for the old static HTML files generated by bbgen in favor 
> > > of a modernized web interface. And the web U/I is fairly 
> > > independent from the rest of Hobbit, so it is easy to change.
> >
> > I took a look at this a bit. The hardest part about this as I see 
> > it, would be pulling information from multiple data sources. For 
> > report data I could use bb commands (hobbitdxboard, or others), but 
> > then I would need to parse the server's bb-host file for page 
> > layouting. Which isn't a huge problem, just adds complication.
>
> This assumes you want to keep on using bb-hosts as the source of your 
> layout - I don't think that is a good idea. I would much rather have 
> all of the webpage layout stuff moved somewhere separate, so you can 
> generate multiple different sets of webpages from the same monitoring 
> data. So there would be one XML file describing how the webpages are 
> laid out, which hosts goes on what pages etc - and another XML file 
> you get from the hobbitdxboard command that fills in the current data
on those pages.
>
The only reason I would assume the need to continue to use the bb-host
file as the source of layout, is because the Hobbit alert & threshold
'PAGE=' 
specifications do. Thats why I mentioned that I thought you had stateted
the need to move away from the bb-hosts config file. GUI Layout seems to
be an integral part of Hobbit (i.e. alert & threshold definitions based
on layout). 
And again, I am not a huge fan of XML, but it seems that it would be a
good option to migrate toward (from bb-hosts). That way if people did
want to write a new GUI for Hobbit it would not be difficult. It would
also be possible to add new fields, without affecting core Hobbit
functionality. i.e. 
writing a version of BBMap for hobbit. 

But again, I remember in a previous post your (and other maillist
members) reluctance to use XML for any configuration. So it almost seems
like a catch22.  So as I see it, ideally need a layout config that:
1. Simple to define layout.
2. Open to custom field definiton additions.
3. Open to allow for 3rd party GUI development.
4. Doesn't break core hobbit functionality.

I maybe stating the obvious, just figure I would flush out my thoughts.
 ~Steve

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