Project

dboard

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Dashboard framework
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 Project Readme

A dashboard framework.

It handles collecting data from user defined sources (simple ruby classes) and provides a simple API to poll for updates. See the example app for information on how to use it.

It's stable and has been in use for quite a while.

Dboard is two parts:

  • The collection process you run on your server. It polls sources for data and sends it to your dashboard web server.
  • The API which combined with for example sinatra (and memcached) becomes a dashboard web server.

Things dboard do for you:

  • Calls your classes for data as often as you have specified.
  • Sends the data to the dashboard web app.
  • Receives and stores the data in the dashboard web app.
  • Provides an API to get data to display on the dashboard.
  • Keeps the latest data in memcache so that all data is available when you visit the databoard, even data from slow or rarely updated sources (like external APIs).
  • Provides a javascript client that knows how to talk to the API (for now it's only included in the example app)
  • Only calls your javascript widgets when there is new data.

Data flow:

+-----------------+              +--------------------+
|                 |              |                    |
|   Collector     | Pushes data  |   Dashboard web    |
|                 +--------------+   server           +----+
|                 |              |                    |    |
+-----------------+              +--------------------+    | Polls for updates
   |           |                                           |
   |           |                                           |
+--+--+     +--+--+                         +--------------+-------------+
|     |     |     |                         |                            |
|     |     |     |                         |  Dashboard page            |
+-----+     +-----+                         |                            |
Source A    Source B                        |                            |
                                            |  See the example app.      |
                                            |                            |
                                            |                            |
                                            |                            |
                                            |                            |
                                            |                            |
                                            |                            |
                                            |                            |
                                            |                            |
                                            |                            |
                                            +----------------------------+

The ASCII drawing above was created using http://www.asciiflow.com/.

Todo:

  • Include the client side dashboard script (see the example app for now).
  • Provide additional tools for creating dashboards (layout css, graphical widgets, etc). Probably as another gem.
  • Tools for deployment (if it can be made generic enough), otherwise a general guide.
  • Make the example app a bit more realistic. Dev-mode tools (foreman, guard, auto-reload-sources), use the collector, layout, more sources, etc.
  • If someone wants to add it: support for pushing data to the client using web sockets.