[noctool-devel] CSS is good, right?

[William Annis]

 >From: Jim Prewett <download at hpc.unm.edu>
 >
 >>         I've never been convinced that web pages are the best way to
 >> interact with system monitoring data, except for the most trivial of
 >> cases.  
 >
 >I think thats true in a lot of cases for sure.  BUT, my boss *LOVES* his 
 >Ganglia pages, etc.  If I can give him a decent web interface, he's /much/ 
 >more likely to continue funding my work on Noctool :)

        There's no doubt sexy blink-panels dazzle managers nicely.

 >> I've been banging away at an SVG library for CL entirely because of
 >> this one URL.
 >
 >Awesome!  I was thinking SVG would be nice for graph plots (the things 
 >we're currently exporting to GIF) as well simply because, well, they're 
 >scalable :)  I wouldn't have to re-render the image for every size I might 
 >want to display it at, the network bandwidth usage is also not bad when 
 >you use gzip compressed SVG. :)

        Even better, SVG is programmable, with Javascript.  Instead of
reloading images every time you have new data, you could just grab the
new data points and update the graph.  And they don't have to be
complex graphs, either.  Tufte has convinced people that even his
little sparklines are valuable, and I always found the lightweight,
live graphs in Tkined (an underrated SNMP/Tcl/Tk tool) useful:

    http://www.ibr.cs.tu-bs.de/projects/nm/scotty/gifs/news.gif

You can cram a lot of useful information into a small space, and
minimize pointless web traffic.  Potentially, at least.  I've still
got plenty of work to do.

--
wm