Innovative use of WebSphere Smash, part 1th: Building a flexible and practical dashboard framework

When new technologies emerge, especially when programming languages and models appear, there is a time when there will be a lot of how-to articles that help developers work. Over time, these guides will delve into more advanced concepts, but often do not introduce the implementation details of the actual technology application. Hello World is a typical example of a basic application, but when you want to build your application yourself, only the actual example will inspire the next killer application project.

This series of articles shows 3 practical examples of how to choose Ibm®websphere®smash and how to use it to perform innovative and valuable tasks. These examples are related to IBM's Green Innovation Data center in South Berry, Connecticut, in the United States (innovation). The data center is both a customer briefing center and a living laboratory. Some of IBM's latest energy-efficient hardware, software, and operational practices are being tested and developed here. In part 1th, you will learn how to use the WebSphere SMash to build a flexible framework for building a data center dashboard.

Brief introduction

IBM's Innovation Engineering team was involved in innovative projects at IBM's Green Innovation Data center in Connecticut, South Berry, while studying the monitoring and reporting of energy efficiency metrics, as well as the use of cloud computing technologies, To maximize the transactional workload generated by each kilowatt hour of power into the data center. It is through these projects and experiments that the examples presented in this series of articles are available. Part 1th of this series describes the dashboard framework that the team builds with IBM WebSphere SMash, which helps to show the energy efficiency of the GIDC. Part 2nd describes how to use WebSphere SMash to encapsulate External system management tools to provide Easy-to-use APIs. Part 3rd describes how to use the WebSphere SMash simplified workflow functionality to manage automation and manual process steps.

Now start the 1th part.

Dashboard Project Overview

Just as the Life Lab, which showcases cutting-edge energy-efficient infrastructure technology, is hosting IBM's internal applications, GIDC is a highly complex environment. The challenge is to aggregate and display data about the profiles of different stakeholders (system administrators and owners, business analysts, and executives).

The target for this dashboard project has two aspects:

Quickly deliver dashboard prototypes that showcase real-time energy efficiency metrics for the data center to complement the IBM Tivoli solution deployed in GIDC.

Build APIs for dashboard data and widgets that can be reorganized in a variety of ways.

This prototype includes a dashboard that visually displays GIDC energy efficiency metrics. In addition, we have produced a graphical prototype of the thermal diagram to display the temperature readings in the room, including the optimized version for mobile applications.

This article describes how to create a dashboard using a basic Dojo chart drawing widget, and why WebSphere SMash is the ideal tool for this scenario. When selecting the Run-time environment for this prototype project, we noted the following functional and non-functional requirements, and how to make WebSphere sMash more suitable for delivering solutions:

Use native Dojo support to generate rich visual dashboards that contain dynamic graphics and charts.

A composite model of reusable components enables us to display data that can be aggregated through the RESTful API smarts.

Lightweight configuration requirements are a central tenet of the WebSphere sMash approach because they are out-of-the-box and provide enough space for configuration.

Fast start and the flexibility to adapt to our needs along the way, WebSphere SMash supports this flexibility through its lower to moderate learning curve, useful online support, and rapid development capabilities.

The following step-by-step describes the dashboard application design and how to use some of the rich features of the WebSphere SMash to create this application design.

Architecture and Design

The GIDC history and real-time data from the data center sensor are summarized in an external monitoring component. This monitoring component renders data as a JSON object through the RESTful API. The WebSphere SMash contains libraries that make outbound RESTful calls and process JSON objects, making it ideal for building the dashboard we need.

One of our design options is to build a nested dashboard using the combination technology. The following is the nested structure you have selected:

Gets the data from the monitoring component and displays it as a JSON string.

Create and display widgets that visually interpret step 1 points, and use asynchronous (Ajax-style) technology to support real-time changes in data.

Build a dashboard based on the widget combination in step 2.

If you want to repeat step 3, build the dashboard for each stakeholder.

Figure 1. Overall architecture