Darwin Night 6

Everyone else seems to have nice GUI’s already. I really haven’t made very much progress relative to the other competitors! This is no fault of the IDE, but rather my inexperience and choice of tools. That said, the resources available to the NetBeans and Ruby community are tremendous and I’ve got the core of the application running. There is still a lot to do:

• Allow the user to maintain a list of “drones” on the network from which to request CPU data.
• Finalize the the tables that track each drone so that the user may view and track each in a nice manner
• Secure the drones–right now they’re just responding with generic HTTP. Hopefully I can figure out something better.
• Create an administrator interface to manage aforementioned drones.
• Package the application so that it is easy to distribute and judges can test the application without worrying about dependencies and security.

For Windows development it would be rather nice to have a hassle free all-in-one executable to do all of this for the user. I find myself thinking of ways I would do this in Delphi… dropping a DevExpress cxGrid on a form, setting a few properties to link to the database, compiling, and bang! You would have a very basic monitoring utility as a system administrator on a small network.

Here are a few screenshots for your enjoyment:

This code resides in a Ruby on Rails application which I hope to be the administrator interface. Notice there’s not much to it! It just grabs a string from the drone via HTTP.

The code to render a basic response with the CPU information I thought was useful. Notice there is no temperature… that’s beyond my expertise, especially in Windows. Lots of things are beyond my expertise!

A Rails application on Webrick responding to a request.

The rendered page sans a template.

That’s all for tonight in this post, I’ll be plugging away for awhile longer in the hopes of being competitive!

Steve