[PEAK] Proposal for another Wiki "tutorial"

[John Landahl]

On Tuesday 13 July 2004 12:42 pm, Paul Moore wrote:
> I'm thinking of putting another tutorial-style series of pages on the
> Wiki. I'm not experienced in PEAK, so it's from the perspective of
> someone who is learning as they go along.

I'm interested in helping with this.  PEAK needs a few good example 
applications that are small enough to digest easily while large enough to do 
something useful.  The application you have in mind is right up my alley -- 
the PEAK-based application I was building at my previous job was a 
configuration management tool (like Cfengine but with a much larger feature 
set) which might have grown a monitoring tool at some point, so I've put some 
thought into how one might be built using PEAK.

If you'd be willing to take a different approach, that of building a 
functional PEAK+Twisted demo application, I could write a lot of the base 
code to get the app off the ground.  There's a public space for PEAK-based 
application development at http://peakplace.tigris.org/ -- its CVS repository 
would be a natural place for this to go.

> The application I have in mind is basically a server monitoring tool -
> send "pings" to a set of servers and collect the results back.

Were you planning on using pure Python to do pings, or calling out to 
something like fping?  The latter would save a lot of time, since there don't 
seem to be any similarly comprehensive ping implementations for Python.  
After ping one would naturally want higher level protocols like HTTP, IMAP, 
SMTP, etc., which is where Twisted would come in.  peak.events should be an 
integral part of the application from the beginning.  ZConfig would be a good 
initial choice for specifying targets, groups, tests, test assignments, and 
alerts/notifications.  At some point, maybe sometime after the new 
peak.storage arrives, it would be nice to keep a lot of this in a database, 
along with test/alert history.

I've got to run, but let's chat about this more...