Managed Resources Exposed Via WebDAV

Thanks to Greg Hinkle, Jopr has recently introduced an experimental feature that exposes your managed environment as a WebDAV repository.

This means that you can use any WebDAV client to browse your managed environment as if it were a simple file system and peek into your resource hierarchy, obtaining information such as a resource's availability, its configuration and measurement trait data (watch this WebDAV demo to see it in action; Greg's blog post and demo are here).

If you aren't familiar with WebDAV, all this means is that your managed environment will look like a simple file system (in the Microsoft Windows vernacular, it is called a "Web Folder"). Directories in this "file system" or "Web Folder" represent managed resources and files found in those directories represent data about those resources.

So, for example, if you had a machine called "comp.xyz.com", and on that machine you have installed a JBossAS server, a PostgreSQL server and a network adapter, your WebDAV file system paths to access those resources could look like this (notice how they look like simple file system paths):

Machine itself:	/webdav/resource/comp.xyz.com
Network adapter:	/webdav/resource/comp.xyz.com/eth0
JBossAS server:	/webdav/resource/comp.xyz.com/Banking%20App
PostgreSQL DB:	/webdav/resource/comp.xyz.com/My%20Postgres

This is currently in the "experimental" phase; however, by watching my WebDAV demo, it should be easy to see how this can prove to be a very powerful feature. Using any WebDAV client, you potentially could obtain alot of information about your managed resources (measurement data, alerts, events, logs, configuration and much more). It's pretty easy to add functionality to this WebDAV interface, so providing access to things like measurement data, alerts, events and the like should not be hard to accomplish. In about 30 minutes, I added the ability to view a resource's measurements traits (you will see that feature in the demo). 6/29/2009 note: spent another couple hours coding and was able to incorporate authentication/authorization into the WebDAV tier so it utilizes the normal Jopr authz layer; also added a new WebDAV resource "measurement_data.xml" which is an XML file of the numeric measurement data for a resource (min, max, avg values, etc).

Now we just need to find the time to flush out this functionality and make it production ready with additional features. If you are interested in working with the Jopr team and willing to get your hands dirty writing code, this might not be a bad place to start. You really don't need to know too much about the internals of the Jopr Server - you just have to interface with the internal Jopr stateless session EJB3 beans to obtain data about resources. The WebDAV API seems pretty easy to use - it's all based on the third party library called Milton. Don't hesitate to ask the team for help in getting started as a Jopr developer, we are usually around on freenode at #jopr or send an email to "jopr-dev at lists.jboss.org"