From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2007-07-06T22:50:50+09:00
Subject: Re: Can you recommend a language to...

Sharon Phillips wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Second question for the evening, but very closely related to the first.
> 
> I've written some monitoring software at work, and would like to extend
> it quite a bit, including a gui with a few graphs.
> Ruby is causing me grief when it comes to distributing it (see 'Oh the
> Pain!...'), and assuming there's no way to overcome this, can anyone
> recommend a language that:
> * has a canvas with anti-aliasing, alpha-blending and double buffering 
> (or binding to a toolkit with one)
> * is simple to distribute
> * is cross platform (*nix and Windows)
> * is not Java (I actually like Java, I'm just trying to get away from it)
> * graphing libraries a bonus. Don't mind writing my own.
> 
> I've considered a web app, but two things stand in my way:
> * Somewhere to host it (not much here you guys can help with)
> * Graphs becoming images and constant page refreshes chewing up
> bandwidth on the LAN.
> I need to be able to update the graphs and any other displays regularly
> (every minute or so) without sending another whole page. Currently all
> I've seen of web graphs are generated on the server and sent out as
> images. I'd like the ability to make them interactive down the track, if
> possible.
> 
> Any help, advice or war stories much appreciated.
> 
> Cheers,
> Dave
> 
> 
> 
> 

By monitoring, are you talking about a bunch of systems, processor
utilization, network bandwidth, disk, memory, etc.? If so, there are
full open-source packages that do this already! Many of them have at
their core a marvelous invention called "rrdtool", which has bindings
for all of the major scripting languages including Ruby. But if you're
willing to do Perl, PHP and/or Python, there are two fairly complete
front ends, Cricket and Cacti. I forget which languages these two use,
but given that RRDTool is the core, you should be able to hack upon them
in Ruby as well.