Song Of The Day: Pushin’ On (Instrumental) - Artist: Dent
Although I took a brief hiatus from blogging, I have been busy on a couple of other initiatives.
For one I’m in a new group at AOL focused on strategic technologies and operations. Since I’ve only been a part, officially, for a couple of weeks, there isn’t much more I can add about the move at this point :).
Two, I’ve been helping folks on streaming initiatives. Cannot say much more about that either, sorry.
Third, on a more unambiguous note, AOL has allowed me to jumpstart an open source, network monitoring initiative, which I’ve called dent. I picked the name “dent” because those involved with network analysis and remediation usually want to make a “dent” in those problems quickly and easily. Both of which aren’t typically the case. Furthermore, I thought the name contained a clever dual meaning along the lines of the character Arthur Dent in the Douglas Adams’ books. When analyzing and optimizing, don’t panic!
The plan is to develop a network modeling and analysis tool based upon browser technologies and the packet capture library (pcap) with three major components: a browser extension, a local daemon and shell, and a relational database for data aggregation, modeling, and analysis. My vision is for folks, engineering types, to be able to fire up a browser with an extension, select a performance model, start a trace, and, afterwards, see graphed analysis and recommendations rendered within the browser. Moreover, with automation and grid capabilities tests could be more algorithmic in nature. The current prototype incorporates Mozilla/Firefox, SpiderMonkey, NSPR, NSS, sqlite, and pcap, to name a few technologies.
Concerning the background behind dent, I’m just interested in building an easy-to-use application that I always wanted but never could quite find in other tools entirely. Also, I want to complement centralized “QA or performance group or department” trouble-shooting and analysis with decentralized aids and utilities for individual developers. In some ways web application performance and optimization tools lag quite-a-bit behind other engineering debugging tools and methods. Could an engineer imagine a world where there was no gdb or gprof and that crash reports had to go to a centralized company or person before getting visibility into problems? Too many times in web application circles implementers do just that–wait on “expert groups or people” for feedback–creating prolonged development cycles.
I do realize that there are good tools out there: livehttpheaders, JavaScript consoles, Web Developer Toolbars, windump, etc (i.e., to name a few). However, I think more effort is needed to bring together the best trouble-shooting mechanisms into easy-to-use applications. Perhaps “dent” can help fill part of that gap.
There is more to implement before dent will be ready for general release, but I am truckin’ away and if something in this blog entry peaks your interest, and you’d like to help, please let me know. Look to my blog or the sourceforge project page for periodic updates.
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