[Hobbitmon-developer] Xymon client design (was Xymon is practically dead)

[Henrik Størner]

On Fri, Jul 02, 2010 at 10:27:41AM -0500, TJ Yang wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Jul 2, 2010 at 9:44 AM, Tom Georgoulias
> <tomg at mcclatchyinteractive.com> wrote:
> > On 07/02/2010 05:47 AM, Neil Franken wrote:
> >
> >> Xymon is just one part of the equation for me. I see a lot of
> >> potential for Xymon in the Windows world but the BBWin client is well
> >> a very quiet project as well. I am not sure yet if we would maybe
> >> fork the code or create a new client. At this point I would suggest
> >> that maybe we look at a Java based client for xymon so we can run on
> >> a huge variety of platforms with one client. Anyway the whole client
> >> is a whole different ball game.
> >
> > I would not be in favor of a java based client, the current design is much
> > better on unix systems.  It's one of the reasons xymon works well.
> >
> 
> I can understand why Neil has this idea, it flashed in brain before.
> Why not write once and run every where ?

One very simple reason: The client needs to know about the
specifics of the operating system it is running on - that's 
the whole purpose of having a client! Java tries very hard to
isolate the underlying OS from the apps running inside the
JVM, which runs counter to this.

In other words - when you want to report on metrics specific
to the OS, it doesn't really make sense to use an OS-agnostic
tool.

Another reason is that the client shouldn't require a lot of 
additional software besides what comes with the OS. And the
output from the OS-specific tools will be well known to the
admins who are going to use the data from Xymon.


Regards,
Henrik