rumx

Description:

Ruby Management Extensions

Allows you to easily implement management interfaces for your Ruby application by adding Rumx beans. A Rumx bean is an object that allows external access to specified attributes and operations. It is basically equivalent to a JMX MBean.

Install:

gem install rumx

Usage:

You can easily add management interfaces to your classes by including Rumx::Bean and creating bean attributes and operations. For example, you might create a class as follows:

require 'rumx'

class MyBean
  include Rumx::Bean

  bean_attr_reader   :greeting,           :string,  'My greeting'
  bean_reader        :goodbye,            :string,  'My goodbye'
  bean_attr_accessor :my_accessor,        :integer, 'My integer accessor'

  bean_operation     :my_operation,       :string,  'My operation', [
      [ :arg_int,    :integer, 'An int argument'   ],
      [ :arg_float,  :float,   'A float argument'  ],
      [ :arg_string, :string,  'A string argument' ]
  ]

  def initialize
    @greeting    = 'Hello, Rumx'
    @my_accessor = 4
  end

  def goodbye
    'Goodbye, Rumx (hic)'
  end

  def my_operation(arg_int, arg_float, arg_string)
    "arg_int class=#{arg_int.class} value=#{arg_int} arg_float class=#{arg_float.class} value=#{arg_float} arg_string class=#{arg_string.class} value=#{arg_string}"
  end
end

Note that all Rumx::Bean public methods are prefixed with "bean_" to help avoid name collisions.

You create a tree of beans under Rumx::Bean.root. For instance, you might create a tree for the bean above with the following commands:

my_folder = Rumx::Beans::Folder.new
Rumx::Bean.root.bean_add_child(:MyFolder, my_folder)
my_folder.bean_add_child(:MyBean, MyBean.new)

Rumx includes a Sinatra server app called Rumx::Server. You could startup a server by creating the following config.ru and running "rackup -p 4567"

require 'rubygems'
require 'rumx'
require 'my_bean'
require ...

run Rumx::Server

Then, you can just browse to http://localhost:4567 to inspect, modify, and execute attributes and operations.

Rumx comes with some ready-made beans that you can use within your application. For instance, suppose you wanted to track the amount of time that an expensive operation takes to execute. You might do something like the following:

class MyClass
  @@timer = Rumx::Beans::Timer.new
  Rumx::Bean.root.bean_add_child(:my_timer, @@timer)

  def my_expensive_operation
    @@timer.measure do
      ...
    end
  end

  ...
end

Then you could use a tool such as munin, nagios, hyperic, etc to poll the url http://my-host:4567/my_timer.json?reset=true to monitor, graph, or create an alert based on the average, max, and min times that your operation takes. Refer to the timer example for more information.

TODO

Figure out the "NameError - uninitialized constant Rack::File:" error that occurs frequently on startup and seems related to the tree not displaying correctly. Works okay with refresh. (Current workaround is to require 'rack/file in server.rb)

Api doc non-existent.

Really needs some html/css love. Right now the sinatra pages are so ugly they'll make your eyes hurt but I don't do this stuff so well. Volunteers anyone?

Need tests! So far just doing Example Driven Development.

Bridge to JMX?

Allow validations in attribute declarations?

New types :date and :datetime?

Implement some kind of push of entire attribute tree to a central server for processing. Push would probably require the class name for unmarshaling. Include some mechanism for summation of data. For instance, the timer would sum up all timer instances (possibly by just creating a '+' operator. All beans would probably have a reset attribute that they could optionally implement so that after tree was pushed, a reset would occur for those beans that need it (Timer). Since multiple clients might want to access a Timer and we only want one to actually reset it, a History buffer might be nice. This would also be useful for alerting to provide some state when determining if an alert should be made.

Need to return NaN's for things like max_time in the Timer bean. Using 0 is just wrong and makes the ruminate graphs all spiky.

Author