HCM Updates and Future Plans

HCM 0.1.1 was released, it’s a bugfix release mostly related to wrong behavior in displaying logs interactively. Regular logging to file was not impacted. I also tried to make the logging page look a little nicer, and I increased the log history from 250 lines to 500.

Unless there are more bugs, that’ll be the last of the 0.1 series. 0.2 will start by adding in database support (I’m including the HSQLDB jars so you won’t have to install a heavy-weight database), that will allow interactive configuration in the future, as well as support for message queues. Before I get too far into the queuing (I’m not sure if that’ll be in 0.2 or 0.3) I’d like to add some basic email support (that’s what is going to require configuration) to see if I can have HCM send out notifications if there are problems with interfaces. At first this will have to be just if the clients are stopped for whatever reason, but maybe I can provide inactivity, queue depth or even external down notification in the future. (From experience, external down is usually not useful information unless data that’s supposed to be flowing and isn’t.)

I’ll be added probably three properties to the hcm.properties file. They should be “hcm.db.url”, “hcm.db.user”, “hcm.db.pass”. It’ll auto create the DB if it doesn’t exist (letting you specify any DB system you want, if you have the support jars handy). But before you go out and buy an Oracle license, for this kind of work it’s entirely possible the HSQLDB will be both faster and more robust.

Lastly, I’m working on moving the repositories from CVS to SVN. Hopefully I can make it easier for people to get the source if they want it (not that anybody’s been banging at my door to download it). I also want to try it for my own purposes as CVS over SSH is pretty clunky.