[Bioclusters] on the topic of grid engine... (I've got a basic XSLT qstat web interface ready for poking)

[Chris Dagdigian]

{ ... a personal project that may be of minor interest to some folks 
here. I figured I'd get feedback from here first before letting 
users at gridengine.sunsource.net know about it }

I'm taking a "web services and service oriented architectures" night 
class and learned just enough XML/DOM/XPATH/XSLT to become dangerous.

Since Grid Engine now can output status information in XML I thought it 
would be a fun personal project to try to put together a web interface 
to the qstat monitoring utility that took raw XML from Grid Engine and 
transformed it into XHTML via XSLT transformations. If it works the 
method is cleaner and more extensible than just parsing qstat output and 
marking it up on the fly in a CGI which is what I've done in the past 
when building simple SGE monitoring tools.

Phase 1 is to do this all server-side behind a standard CGI

Phase 2 is to send the raw XML to the browser along with the XSL 
stylesheet so that the browser does the actual HTML rendering. Most 
modern browsers like Safari/IE/Firefox/Mozilla/Opera should be able to 
handle this.

Phase 3 is to add in all sorts of cool google style "xmlhttpget()" 
javascript and DHTML calls so that we can dynamically refresh the 
interface and various overlay DIVs without forcing the user to click 
through various links.

Currently I'm at Phase 0.8 I think -- the basic server side mechanism 
works great with all HTML coming from the XML input but i still need to 
solidify the presentation and stylesheets. The SGE developers also have 
to fix a bug that causes qstat to segfault in xml mode whenever there is 
a job in error state "E"...

The URL is here:
http://scripps.bos.bioteam.net/xml-qstat/ss-qstat.cgi

Looking for feedback from:

o casual folks: would you find this useful if it were eventually 
packaged up and put up on a website somewhere?

The XSL and stylesheets are not yet ready for any sort of real usage and 
I'll be working to optimize/improve things now that the basic functions 
work. Feedback from folks with web design and XML experience would be 
plus as well.

--Chris