[Orca-dev] Orca on rails?

[Cynthia Kiser]

Quoting Blair Zajac <blair at orcaware.com>:
> Well, I must admit, I've been bitten by the Ruby on Rails bug myself and 
> really don't have any desire to code any more with Perl.  Even I look 
> through Orca's source code and wonder what I wrote :)
> 
> I could go into a long list of reasons why I like Ruby the language and 
> Ruby on Rails, but I'll control myself :)

So what do you think about storing the data in a database? There are a
lot of nice aspects to Rails - but one of the major ones is easy
interaction with a relational database. Does it make sense to rewrite
the data aggregation and graphing to use something other than RRDTool?
And would the data collectors remain as is? or be moved to Ruby too? 

I am not sure about Adrian's idea of leaving the data in raw text
files and then using RoR to process them on the fly (if I understood
correctly what his second email proposed). I am afraid it would be
slow - and might eliminate the easy browsing and poking around I enjoy
with the current setup. In fact, other than wanting to add data
collection methods for some stuff (temporature sensors come to mind),
and wishing I had time to pour through the old workload stuff and get
it working with things I want to monitor, the only feature I would
like to see added to Orca is an easy way to pinpoint time intervals so
I could, say, notice a spike that occurred sometime last week and then
graph a 2 hour block around that time. 

-- 
Cynthia Kiser
cnk at caltech.edu
626 395-5710 (work)
626 616-9426 (cell)