Visualizing Distributed Systems of Dynamically Cooperating Services

Systementwicklungsprojekt (SEP)

Overview

The purpose of this SEP was the design and the implementation of the graphical monitoring tool for DWARF systems, DIVE (DWARF Interactive Visualization Environment).

Problem Statement

Finding out what services are running on the various computers and how the DWARF middleware has connected them is a tedious task. For that purpose, a developer usually would open terminal windows that contain the diagnostic output of all participating software components (the service manager on the need’s side and the two services). As the output most of the time also contains other data, finding the right infor-mation there is difficult.

Visualization of DWARF systems as a graph

The purpose of this SEP is to develop a visualization tool for DWARF systems. The software must take account of the distributed aspect of DWARF systems by collecting information about the services from the different service managers. This information is then used to draw a two-dimensional diagram showing the currently active services and the connections between them. Caring about the dynamic aspect of the system, this diagram should always be kept up-to-date to reflect the changes in the system.

Viewing service attributes

A diagram can only contain limited information about the services themselves. Therefore, by clicking on a component in the diagram, a developer should be able to get additional information about it, such as ser-vice attributes, state of the service, name of the host computer, communication protocols, etc.

Event monitoring

Another problem comes up when the system is not working as expected. If the reason is not immediately clear, the communication between the services should be among the first things that are checked. To help in the debugging process, the visualization tool should provide means to monitor the communication be-tween services. The first version only includes support for CORBA structured events, but the application should be extensible to other forms of communication.

A screenshot of DIVE in action

Documents

ProjectForm
Title:	Visualizing Distributed Systems of Dynamically Cooperating Services
Abstract:	To facilitate the development of distributed augmented reality applications, the chair of applied software engineering at TU M?unchen has developed the DWARF software archi- tecture. The heart of this architecture is a middleware which dynamically locates and connects services distributed across a network. Applications built on top of DWARF inherently are self-assembling. Developers who are working with DWARF systems often face the problem that it is difficult to see how the components, spread all over the network, are connected by the middleware. The solution to this problem proposed here is DIVE (DWARF Interactive Visualiza- tion Environment), a visualization tool for DWARF systems which I have designed and implemented as a system development pro ject (SEP). This document is the DIVE manual both for users and developers. It’s basic structure follows the methodology described in [10]. The document starts with a chapter about requirements analysis, followed by a discussion of existing graph layout tools. Chapters 4 and 5 will give details about the system and ob ject design of DIVE. Chapter 6 describes possible future extensions. New users of DIVE are recommended to read the requirements analysis chapter which shows how the software is operated from a user’s perspective. The other chapters are more technical and aimed towards future developers who need to understand the internal structure of DIVE.
Student:	Daniel Pustka
Director:	Bernd Brügge
Supervisor:	Asa MacWilliams
Type:	SEP
Status:	finished
Start:
Finish:	2003/03/15

Attachment	Action	Size	Date	Who	Comment
DIVE2.png	manage	19.4 K	14 Jun 2005 - 07:57	ChristianSandor	Screenshot of DIVE in action
DIVEDocumentation.pdf	manage	302.3 K	14 Jun 2005 - 07:57	ChristianSandor	Daniel's thesis
DIVEOberseminarSlides.pdf	manage	191.0 K	14 Jun 2005 - 07:58	ChristianSandor	Daniel's Presentation about DIVE

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