Re: [Rackview-devel] Questions about mods/extensions etc.

[Bryce H. <br...@os...>]

On Wed, 17 Sep 2003, Bryce Harrington wrote:
> On Wed, 17 Sep 2003, Andersson, Magnus wrote:
> > Hi.
> >
> > I just joined this list and I'm wondering what features are on the to
> > do or wish list and what mods, extensions, connections to other tools
> > etc that people have made or have ideas for when it comes to rackview.

Oh, btw, one very blue-sky idea I have had is to make the top-down view
be dynamically generated.

The top down view that we did for the OSDL lab is an SVG drawing done
using Sodipodi.  I save it as a png and then manually imagemap it to
provide the rackview interface.

The idea would be to have enough data in rackview's database about exact
cabinet sizes, placements, orientations, etc. that the SVG could be
generated on the fly.

A follow-on idea would be to make the front-view into dynamically
generated SVG as well, which would permit a more artistically pleasing
display of the racks than can easily be done with HTML tables as we do
now.

Of course, since few web browsers support SVG, these drawings would also
need to be saved into png's on the fly, but this is not a major problem;
Sodipodi can be used in a commandline fashion to do this, or librsvg
could be employed.

Of course, you'd also want something which could intelligently set up
the imagemap coordinates based on info in the SVG.

One could also extrapolate even further, in that once you have position,
orientation, and size data for everything in a database, you have enough
info to do a 3D render via VRML or OpenGL or SDL something.  The
proprietary rack visualization systems I looked at have this capability,
so while I'll probably never work on that, if someone were interested in
doing it I'd definitely be in the cheering section.  ;-)

Anyway, in my eye, the above approach would give rackview a very slick
interface and would make it an order of magnitude easier for others to
use.  I wish I had the time to implement it, but unfortunately don't,
but I could probably lend a few cycles in a supporting role if someone
else wanted to have a shot at it.

Bryce