[Buildbot-devel] Fwd: [Buildbot] #641: New Default CSS

[Marcus Lindblom]

On 2009-12-09 20:37, Marc-Antoine Ruel wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 2:14 PM, Stefan Seefeld<seefeld at sympatico.ca>  wrote:
>> On 12/09/2009 02:08 PM, Dustin J. Mitchell wrote:
>>> Anyone have thoughts on this?  I usually lean toward *not* changing
>>> current behavior when possible.
>>>
>>
>> I wouldn't qualify CSS changes as changing behavior.
>>
>> That being said, Marcus and I have been working on support for
>> templating the web frontend (using jinja2), to give much more power to
>> GUI customization than is possible via CSS. I would rather like to see
>> this question addressed in that context.

 > Why not use JSON-AJAX? As long as it works on a G1/iphone. I'm almost
 > done with the json exporter and will try to upstream it this year.
 >
 > This way, the html page doesn't even have to be served by buildbot,
 > only the json data, which reduces the bandwidth usage on the (poor
 > single threaded) server and the amount of string processing done in
 > python.
 >
 > M-A
 >
 > Reference:
 > 
http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/tools/buildbot/scripts/master/status_json.py?view=markup

Interesting, but it requires yet another step, so we'll do that when we 
get there. Jinja2 is a reportedly very fast template engine, according 
to it's benchmarks, so I think it will improve performance a bit just 
going there. (Needs testing though.)

But having a separate web server and BuildBot as a web service backend 
is an interesting idea. But I think we have a slight collision course 
with Brians DB work there, as that will bring the data into a SQL DB, 
from which several processes/threads can work.

My idea/hope is that if BuildBot's APIs stay largely the same, one could 
launch one or several "buildmasters" than have nothing but a DB-string 
and a WebStatus object, effectively offloading the web stuff from the 
other parts. (I.e., having a buildbot process querying the DB and 
sending JSON to a web server is an unnecessary step, as we're already 
splitting the single-threaded twisted server into several processes.)

But the JSON stuff should be integrated too. I'd like to write a 
web-theme that uses AJAX heavily for continous updates and aggregate 
views. (I'm using jquery/ajax now at our place to show & auto-update the 
grid for three masters on our main intranet page, but I just retrieve, 
combine and reformat the HTML I get with AJAX (AJAH? :), no JSON.)

Cheers,
/Marcus