[Buildbot-devel] Buildbot Summit - Out of process

[Marcus Lindblom]

On 2010-11-23 18:17, Dustin J. Mitchell wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 9:46 AM, Marc-Antoine Ruel<maruel at chromium.org>  wrote:
>> My main point is: have the web/json/mail status serving in a separate
>> process but reusing the same twisted infrastructure, so status/ classes can
>> be reused as is in a separate project transparently. I'm probably dreaming
>> though. It requires having fully bidirectional communication to control
>> jobs. I should stop writing emails and go back to coding instead.
>
> That's a lot harder than it sounds, since most of the status calls
> that the web status makes are synchronous.  I'd rather separate it out
> as we discussed, with client-side assembly of views and JSON requests
> for state and events.

I've been thinking about this a bit, and there are a few things I don't 
really get about having to jettison the entire jinja-webstatus in order 
to go to statusdb.

(Do note that I'm not grumpy, I'm just trying to understand.. ;-)

Doesn't the JSON status use the same methongs as the WebStatus?
(Or are you talking about a different JSON interface than the one added 
in 0.7.12?)

Also, wouldn't it  be possible to do a  "quickfix" by rewriting the 
webstatus to call the JSON functions instead of the synchronous stuff 
directly. That way you'd use the JSON layer for db-interface, but still 
keep the jinja-based web layer that we use today.

(If we're talking about JSON functions similar to what we have today, 
IIRC they're pretty similar to the web-views, so it'd not be that far 
off, ableit maybe a bit slow and requiring a number of requests, but 
that's a smaller matter at this point, IMHO.)

Given the above, ut'd probably not be that hard to configure the 
WebStatus to run out-of-process. It'll just be a buildbot-master that 
has nothing more than a WebStatus in it. :) Just specify a ip/port to 
talk to (or some magic value that means "this-process's-json-server").

I think that'd be a feasible way forward, until someone writes a decent 
java-script only UI. (And then we could fork out WebStatus so the 
static-html only people can stay happy.)

Or am I missing some important point here?

Cheers,
/Marcus