Status update

[Jan-Henrik Haukeland]

Hi all!

Its been a while since I posted news from m/monit and I just wanted to
let you know what we have been up to since last time.

Though we are still not ready to post a beta for you today, we can at
least show you a wireframe of the m/monit web-application. The wireframe
is only released to members of this mailing list and you can download it
from this URL:

     http://www.tildeslash.com/mmonit/wireframe/

Please use the following username/password to login:

     Username: mmonit
     Password: h47EDCH5

The wireframe specify the functional aspects of the M/MONIT 2.0
web-application [1]. The document is a "clickable" PDF and you can click
on most menus and navigational elements in any page to navigate around.
Hopefully, the wireframe will give a good impression of what to expect
of the m/monit web application. Questions or feedback may be directed to
us directly or to this mailing list, and we will do our best to address
them.

The wireframe is under copyright and released under a simple license.
The reason for this is that we want to reserve the rights to implement
this specification ourself.



So, what is taking us so long?

In short, zild. As you may remember, we will base m/monit on a
C-application server we have created, called zild. We had to rewrite
parts of zild to better support m/monit and to scale well.

Still, we see good progress now [2] and we hope to have zild done within
July or early August. We already have most of the m/monit code ready, so
once zild is finished, we hope to have m/monit up within 3-4 weeks.

I do not dare to commit to a release date, but we can guarantee that
there *will* be a release and I hope that the wireframe will demonstrate
that we are committed.



Why not use Ruby on Rails, PHP or Java to implement m/monit?

Sure, Ruby on Rails, PHP or Java are great platforms. However, a big
part of our philosophy is simplicity, which we are a strong believer in.
And therefore, we want m/monit to have the same simplicity as monit.

I think one of the reason for the success of monit is due to its ease of
use, being autonomous and not depending on lots of external libraries,
plugins and configuration. Likewise, we hope to release m/monit as a
"plug-and-play" system that just works out of the box. In addition
m/monit must scale well if it is to be used together with many hundreds
or thousands of monit agents, and of course, it must be rock solid. We
also want it to scale well on modest hardware.


Design help wanted!

We are still trying to find design help and if you know of a designer
that may be able to help us, please let me know. We need help, not only
with the design and usability of the web-app, but also with HTML, CSS
and JavaScript. We will pay for this help, though our pockets are not
very deep.


Best regards
--
Jan-Henrik Haukeland
http://tildeslash.com/


[1] To limit the scope of the first release we have decided not to
include a statistical module with diagrams and graphical representation
of data. Such a module will be part of later releases.

[2] I have taken time off from consulting work to work exclusively on
zild and m/monit for the last 3 months, and there is definitively
progress.