Irfan@Sun: UIs, Web Stack Enterprise Manager, Dojo, JavaScript and more...

The Web Stack Enterprise Manager (WSEM) has an informational section called the "Recent Alerts" section. The section displays various informational messages triggered from the server or the GUI. 

The messages generated by the GUI are usually in response to an user action such as:

• Clicking the start button for a server
• Clicking 'Save' button on the properties page for a server configuration

The messages generated by the server are usually to indicate to the user that a state on the server backend has changed. These can include messages:

• Indicating a server has started or it failed to start for some reason.
• A new server was installed or removed from the system. 

Another neat feature of the console is that it higlights the latest change in a specific alert color depending on the type of the alert. Hence if the change was informational in nature, you will see a olivish green highlight and for errors, it would be reddish with an error icon.

The following screencast displays the Recent Alerts section in action. Here are the steps that I follow in the screencast.

1. Stop the running Apache server
2. Start the stopped Apache server
3. Start the Lighttpd server which results in an error
4. Stop and start the Apache server from a terminal window
• In this case the Recent Alerts section displays the messages that it receives from the backend server.

The navigation panel in the Web Stack Enterprise Manager displays the various servers that are installed. The panel also indicates the running status of the installed servers with a small indicator to the left of the server's name. The various operations possible are:

• Starting/Stopping the server
• Restarting the server
• Viewing configuration properties for the server

The following image and the following text summarizes what possible indicators are available in the navigation panel.

• Server Status Indicators
  
• - Server Started
• - Server Stopped
• - Server in maintenance mode (Only available in Solaris)

• Lifecycle Operations
  
• - Server is started. Click to stop the server
• - Server is stopped. Click to start the server
• - Restart Server

• Configuration Management Operations
  
• - View configuration properties for the server
• - Server configuration properties have changed. Start/Restart the server to apply the changes.

The Sun GlassFish Web Stack is a complete LAMP/SAMP stack available to developers and administrators for standardizing their LAMP/SAMP deployments. Sun Web Stack, in addition to a vast number of servers and components, has a Web Stack Enterprise Manager tool bundled with it. The Web Stack Enterprise Manager (WSEM) allows users to monitor various aspects of the installed servers. It is very dynamic in nature and automagically picks up the servers as and when they (the servers) are installed. Users can perform the following tasks with the WSEM:

1. View graphs on various available fields for a server
2. Lifecycle operations (Start, Stop and Restart) on the servers
   
3. Enable/Disable monitoring for a server

The WSEM consists of a Dashboard, an Analytics view and a Navigation panel. This blog is about the Dashboard and the Analytics view.

WSEM Dashboard

The Dashboard is the main entry point into the UI. The Dashboard consists of a graphs menu that lists the available graphs for an installed server. You can select a graph from the menu and the WSEM will draw the graph, in real time, on the screen. Various graphs can be plotted in this same manner. The following is a screen shot of the some of the graphs that are available:

Clicking on any of the graphs or the small magnifying glass icon on the graph takes you to the Analytics view. The Analytics view is a detailed view of the graphs in the Dashboard. The Analytics view of a graph offers the following:

• Several fields monitored in a single graph.
• The fields are displayed as legends in the graph
• The fields have a selector check box which allows the users to show/hide that field in the graph.
  
• Data for a specified time period (hourly, daily, weekly and monthly)
  
• Synchronized data across various graphs.
  
• Each graph has a synchronized button which, when clicked, causes the other graphs to move in sync with this graph.
• Ability to view data for various blocks of time in the past.
• You can use the back [] and forward [] buttons to view data in that particular block of time (hourly, daily, weekly or monthly)
  

You can download the Web Stack along with the enterprise manager from http://www.sun.com/software/webstack/get.jsp

Go on download it and give it a shot.

I had a BoF at OSCON2009 about using Dojo and JavaScript to create our Web Stack Enterprise Manager (I will be following this up with a blog on the Enterprise Manager).

The slides for the BoF are here.

I am a UI developer and have been working with Sun for the last 9 years. Yes, I know that is a long time. I started at Sun with the iPlanet Application Server tools group and now a days work with the Sun Web Stack administration team on the Web Stack Enterprise Manager.

I love GUI design and implementation and try to gather as much knowledge as possible on GUI interfaces and interactions. I also like scripting languages and frameworks written around them. Presently I am trying to get my hands dirty with JavaScript and the Dojo framework.