XML, JSON, Webservice or something new ?

[Thomas Guyot-Sionnest]

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On 17/08/09 10:08 PM, Max wrote:
> Hi Derrick,
> 
> On Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 8:32 PM, local.coder<code at novageeks.org> wrote:
>> I am back to writing some code for a new project involving Nagios. As
>> part of this I need light weight data access to status.cgi data.
>> Initially I was planning on modding ministatus.cgi which I know is not
>> part of the contrib anymore but it is a good starting place. At the same
>> time I looked into the status of something more standardized. I would
>> prefer to code to a standard that we can all get behind. The Nagios2Json
>> looks nice in that JSON is a basic format and gives me what I need,
>> however the current project is not Version 3+ compliant. I also found
>> the NXE addon for XML output but that has not been updated in some time.
> 
> The only problem with the current nagios2json is that you cannot do
> discrete queries of hosts/services etc, so not quite ready for AJAX
> UIs.

I like the JSON patch as it implement cleanly a different way of writing
status data to status files. However I had in mind doing something
similar but with CDB. CDB is a small and very efficient read-only
database format that has a C and PHP (among others) APIs. It store only
key-values and it is designed to be written once and acceded read-only;
just as status.dat works currently. OTOH, unlike status.dat it could be
queried instead of parsed in full so it would be a perfect fit for
systems that use an advanced web interface but want to avoid the burden
of ndodb.

>> Before using one of these and making them work I would like to see a
>> standardized model for the XML or JSON data structure. I have seen
>> several items on the wishlist for a webservice interface and that would
>> also work really well but again a standard API would need to be created.
>>
>> What are others doing for small format host and service data and is
>> anyone deeply interested in coming up with some standardized XML or JSON
>> data templates ?
> 
> I vote JSON :), works well with all sorts of web frameworks and for
> high volumes of data much less verbose than XML, we are needing this
> as well and I have been speaking with a teammate of mine on enhancing
> Nagios2JSON as we will be exposing a RESTful interface within our
> organization that lets people GET data out of Nagios with HTTP and
> will let them change our Nagios configuration as well to perform CRUD
> on our configs through web services.   Nagios2JSON is Nagios 3
> compatible (just have to use the VCS rev), maybe we could work
> together on it to enhance Yann's existing code?

I sure would vote JSON over XML, but with JSON you still have to parse
the whole status file for every request. That just doesn't make any
sense for things like showing the status of a single host, especially on
large systems which have lots of services. This is even more true when
AJAX comes in mind; to be usable scripts have to respond quickly. If for
example you click to expand a host detail, it will be much faster if the
backend can just fetch and parse that host's data instead of parsing a
large file...

- --
Thomas
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