Screenshots of enhanced Olesen FLEXlm tools in action
In a follow-up post to Mark's recent announcement we've gotten our hands on some screenshots from Mark showing his tools in use. The screenshots show the results of using XSLT transformations to turn Grid Engine XML data into XHTML form suitable for web pages. The benefit includes web-based visibility into current resource (and software license!) usage. This is exactly the approach that I tried out with the xml-qstat project. Mark is pretty familiar with that effort and will be merging his improvements and enhancements into xml-qstat's SVN repository. Speaking personally as a "scratch an itch" programmer with no real software engineering skill or talent I'm pretty excited to have a real coder take a look at xml-qstat. Related to that I already owe a debt to Petr Jung from Sun who contributed the Java based CommandGenerator code that finally allows xml-qstat to be a 100% Java/Cocoon web application that does not require external perl daemons to cache XML state data.
Before the screen captures, I'd like to ask a favor of people who read this blog. I filed bug Issue #2335 back in July of 2007 and it has not received much love (or even a targeted milestone date for a fix). The bug is a simple one -- "qstat -f -xml" no longer reports load average data which (a) makes xml-qstat a whole lot less useful and (b) breaks the SGE developer philosophy of ensuring that command output returns the same information regardless of output format. Until that bug is fixed it does make sense for xml-qstat to have it's long overdue "1.0" release. If you have a user account over on http://gridengine.sunsource.net I'd appreciate it if you can cast one of your "votes" for Issue 2335. Thanks!
And now the screenshots (edited to mask out personal/company information). Click on each image for a larger version.
qhost overview
Click on through for the rest of the pictures ...
qstat full view (a)
qstat full view (b)
qstat queue summary
qstat resource summary
qstat view
public SVN and a new website for xml-qstat
A side project of mine, http://xml-qstat.org has a new website and (finally!) an accessible SVN code repository for downloading the package. There are still things (such as support for IE browsers) that I’d like to add before a real 1.0 release though. Truth be told the real reason for this post was to have an initial article tagged with the phrase ’xml-qstat’. The beautiful Typo-powered publishing engine running this website can dynamically construct RSS and ATOM syndication feeds based on any article category or tag. Creating the xmlqstat tag and posting news under it results in a quick and dirty way to always have an updated xml-qstat news RSS feed without having to code such features into the xml-qstat.org website.
xml-qstat is an attempt to do something useful with the XML status information that Grid Engine is now able to produce. At it’s heart, xml-qstat consists of a collection of stylesheets written in XSL. The stylesheets can be used with a XSLT transformation engine to change raw Grid Engine XML data into convenient formats such as XHTML and RSS. Once the grid data has been manipulated into XHTML we can then apply other web technologies such as CSS, DHTML and JavaScript to create fairly sophisticated web based tools for Grid Engine status reporting and monitoring. The Apache Cocoon framework supplies the XML transformation and web publishing engine.
XML Feeds