jNag server rewrite underway

Just a quick not to mention that I’ve restarted work on jNag.  First order of business is to rewrite the server side code which, to be frank, is a quick and dirty job I hacked together just to get soemthing working at the time.  The rewrite will incorporate everything I’ve learned about development in the last couple of years and should be much easier to maintain and offer something that’s caused a few people grief with jNag in the past: version support.  On a basic level this means that jNag will be able to support all the different flavours of nagios that are out there by changing a configuration variable (there’s some detail about how this is done below, in case anyone’s interested)

This new version of the server will be backwards compatible with the current versions of the app, but once I’ve rewritten the server I’ll be moving onto the app.  First I’ll be updating the libraries that jNag uses (especially jQuery mobile, which has had a full production release and a point release since the version that shipped with current versions of jNag) and then hopefully adding features.

As a special bonus, here’s some bits of code that deal with loading in different vetrsions of Nagios.

First up, in the core framework class I have this bit of code:

include("includes/main/main_".$this->config->server_type.".php");    
$this->main = new main();

This ‘includes’ a file based on what’s set in the ‘server_type’ config key, and then instantiates the ‘main’ class from that file.

Our main class looks like this:

include("main.php");

/*
 * main class for the 'classic' server type

 */
class main extends main_base{
    function __construct(){
        
    }
    
    public function status(){
        $hosts = json_decode($this->run_query("GET columns\nOutputFormat: json\n\n"));
        echo "<table>";
        $last_table = "table";
        foreach($hosts as $host){
            if ($host[2] != $last_table)
            echo "<tr><td COLSPAN='4' ALIGN='middle' style='background-color:red;'>".$host[2]."</td></tr>";
            $last_table = $host[2];
            echo "<tr><td>".$host[0]."</td><td>".$host[1]."</td><td>".$host[2]."</td><td>".$host[3]."</td></tr>";
        }
        echo "</table>";        
    }

Obviously that’s just the first bit of it, the full class is a bit bigger… buut you can see how it implements the ‘Status’ method.  The full class implements all the methods that our old ‘returndata.php’ file in previous versions of jNag provided and, because the framework can be accessed from any index file we can access it through ‘returndata’ and maintain compatibility.

You’ll notice our ‘main’ class extends a ‘main_base’ class.  That looks something like this:

abstract class main_base{
    
    //show current system status
    abstract protected function status();
    
    //get items that are 'pinned' to the homescreen
    abstract protected function get_pinned();
    
    private function format_time($timestamp){
        if ($timestamp > 0){
            return date("d/m/Y-H:i",$timestamp);
        } else {
            return "Never";
        }
    }

And contains abstract functions for all the methods that our real main class has to implement.  So, once all this is in place all you have to do is create a ‘main’ class for your specific flavour of nagios, set the server_type correctly and jNag will work.

Refactoring this code has really shown how much I’ve learned since I wrote the original.  I’m particularly pleased with how the config class turned out.  It looks like this:

class config {
    
    /*
     * load all config information from $filename.
     * for each key = value in the file you end up with config->key = value;
     */
    public function __construct($filename){        
        $settings = file($filename,FILE_IGNORE_NEW_LINES | FILE_SKIP_EMPTY_LINES);
        foreach($settings as $setting){
            $var_array = split("=",$setting);
            if (substr($var_array[0],0,2) != "//"){
                $var_array[0] = trim($var_array[0]);
                $var_array[1] = trim($var_array[1]);
                if (strtolower($var_array[1]) == "true")
                $var_array[1] = true;
                if (strtolower($var_array[1]) == "false")
                $var_array[1] = false;
                $variable = $var_array[0];                
                $this->$variable = $var_array[1];
            }
        }
         public function getValue($key){
            return $this->$key;
        }
}

And, as the comments say, you pass it a file with key / value pairs in the constructor like this:

$config = new config($myfile);

and then you can do something like this:

$foo = $config->getValue("foo");

Anyway, that’s it really… stay tuned for more news as the rewrite progresses.