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:
- Simple to define layout.
- Open to custom field definiton additions.
- Open to allow for 3rd party GUI development.
- Doesn't break core hobbit functionality.
I maybe stating the obvious, just figure I would flush out my thoughts. ~Steve
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