Thomas Krause wrote:
> Andrea,
> 
> I'm glad that you like it. The screenshots look OK to me.
> 
> What I also need in the near future is a GUI frontend to si_mkclientnetboot
> that lets me set up one or more clients for reimaging.
> 
> Seeing this ticket: http://trac.systemimager.org/ticket/13 I can see that
> you are also interested in making more SI features available through GUIs.
> 
> Do you have concrete plans for this?

Nothing concrete, except the few requirements defined in the ticket. I
also started to write the GUI in python and PyGTK for its simplicity and
the speed of development (in ~30mins I've implemented the
start/stop/configuration of the daemons). Anyway this interface is not
yet usable and needs additional work.

At the moment the most important functionalities to be implemented with
a GUI are:
- monitoring (ok, and for this we already have good implementations)
- an interface to si_clusterconfig (that also produces a XML output,
  see /etc/systemimager/cluster.xml)
- an interface to start/stop/configure systemimager daemons (at least a
  simple interface to just edit /etc/systemimager/* files and start/stop
  /etc/init.d/systemimager* daemons)
- an inteface to manage images (copy, rename, remove, show details)
- an interface to manage clients boot (si_mkclientnetboot, DHCP
  configuration, etc)

> I believe that a web interface is the best way to do this administration.

I agree, I've to say that a full AJAX interface would be a lot more
appealing than the usual script/binary GUI and I think this is the right
direction.

> I could develop such an interface (at least to si_mkclientnetboot),
> but I'd
> like to know if you have any requirements or ideas how such an interface
> should look like.

IMHO it would be great if the web interface would be able to just
execute si_mkclientnetboot (or any other SystemImager commands) for now.

In this way we wouldn't have redundant code to be maintained/fixed. And
since SI is fully implemented in perl it's not so easy to export API or
interfaces to web-based applications now. So, the invocation of SI
methods, at the moment, can only be performed directly by the execution
of SI commands from the shell. Probably a RMI/RPC approach would be the
best solution, but let's proceed step by step...

> Another question is in what programming language this should be written in.
> I'm not really comfortable with Perl and afaik it isn't that well suited for
> webpages anyway. Anything else would probably add further dependencies to SI
> though.

As I said AJAX IMHO is the right direction. Unfortunately I'm not
familiar with AJAX at all, so I don't know which AJAX framework should
be used. Your si_monitor client seems fine, what are the
limitations/advantages/disadvantages to implement all the GUI
functionalities in the same way?

-Andrea

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