jobscheduler.com blog moved. Please update your RSS feed.
I’ve moved my jobscheduler.com blog to a different platform. The new RSS feed address is:
My blog remains at http://jobscheduler.com. New posts will be posted on the tumblr.com platform and no longer here at wordpress.com.
Cognos report automation and tracking
Cognos report automation and tracking is in the Flux 7.11 development builds now.
Here’s a screenshot with the new Cognos tab on the menu bar highlighted.
Quick screencast introduction to Flux 7.10
See the web-based Flux Operations Console monitor a file transfer job in is 56 seconds.
Just checked in flux.CognosAction
Starting to stub in the UI and API for Cognos support in Flux. Here’s the first sketch of the UI.
The API lets Java developers call new CognosAction(), set up the action’s properties to run a report on a Cognos server, and add it into a Flux workflow.
Once a Cognos report is generated from within a Flux job or workflow, the report file can be transferred to just about any destination using Flux’s existing suite of file transfer capabilities.
Meetup at CES this week?
Anyone coming to CES this week and want to meetup?
The Consumer Electronics Show runs from Thursday, 6 January through Sunday, 9 January.
I live in Las Vegas, so it’s easy for me to find convenient places to meetup.
Anyone up for a simple get-together at CES?
Longtime user says nice thing about Flux Operations Console
A longtime Flux user said a nice thing about the new Operations Console in Flux 7.10:
The new and improved console is great! Seems to be much more responsive and intuitive compared to the previous one. — JJ
Why I like REST better than RMI: mobile devices
Previously, I’ve blogged about the REST APIs in Flux and why I like REST better than RMI. Then Eric, our lead developer, blogged about mobile devices on his blog, fluxstuff.com.
Eric’s post got me to thinking about another reason why I like REST better than RMI.
Mobile devices can easily make REST calls to obtain the status of server applications. With RMI, that can’t be easy.
To prove it, Eric wrote a mobile application in ~2 hours that accesses Flux server status using REST. Here’s a ~1 minute video that shows off Eric’s mobile app:
Why I like REST better than RMI for Flux
Like many other systems, you can communicate with Flux over the network. Flux uses RMI for network communications, but now I’m in favor of swapping out RMI for REST.
Here’s why.
With RMI, the user has to know the host and port where Flux is located. This is typical with networked systems. However, with RMI the user may also need to know the bindname, RMI registry port, and RMI server object ports. That’s unusual.
With REST, the user only needs to know the host and port. Period. In other words, “Hey Juan! What’s the host and port for Flux?” That’s it.
Flux 7.11 Promote/Migration Capability
In Flux 7.11, you can promote (migrate) jobs and workflows from development to QA to production and so forth. Below are mockups of the user interface.
You’ll see exactly how this works later, but this is a start.
In short, using the Flux Operations Console, you can promote (copy) your workflows and jobs between your environments using point and click.
Flux 7.11 Job Scheduler Offers REST API
With Flux 7.10 very close to a GA release, we are starting to think about Flux 7.11′s features. One of them will make Flux’s job scheduler engine accessible via a REST API.
With Flux 7.11′s REST API, you can connect to and control the Flux job scheduler remotely using any programming language that supports RESTful Web services.
This makes it possible to do an exciting thing: you can easily access the Flux job scheduler using non-Java programming languages.
We will provide full REST documentation that describes the REST services that Flux 7.11 will make available. As part of that documentation, we’ll provide code examples. Obviously, we’ll provide Java code examples.
But this begs a question: what other programming languages can we provide examples for? C# or Python? C++ or JavaScript?
What programming language would you like to see a code example in?
