libPaje 0.4.1 review

libPaje is a library developed in GNUstep environment and is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License. The library int

License: LGPL (GNU Lesser General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Lucas Schnorr

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libPaje is a library developed in GNUstep environment and is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License.

The library intends to provide a better way to generate trace files for Paje Visualization Tool.

libPaje library can be used to create conversion tools from other format to Paje trace file format.

Paje is an interactive and scalable trace-based visualization tool which can be used for a large variety of visualizations including:

performance monitoring of parallel applications
monitoring the execution of processors in a large scale PC cluster
representing the behavior of distributed applications
cluster monitoring and management

Users of Paje can tailor the visualization to their needs, without having to know any insight nor to modify any component of Paje. This can be done by defining the type hierarchy of objects to be visualized as well as how these objects should be visualized. This feature allows the use of Paje for a wide variety of visualizations such as the use of resources by applications in a large-size cluster or the behavior of distributed Java applications.

The Paje trace format include three different kind of informations:

definition of the formats of the event
definition of the type hierarchy of the objects to be visualized
set of recorded events complying with the format definition and according to the type hierarchy previously defined.

Although the Paje trace file format is very easily to understand, there are no library or program to generate files in this format directly. Normally, it is necessary a conversion from a set of information to the format readable to Paje. To make this conversion process more abstract in terms of the definition of a Paje trace file, we create this libPaje.

The libPaje library intends to cover the three different kind of information in a Paje trace file.

It manages the first kind, the definition of the formats of the event, with PajeHeaderCenter class. This class automatically generates code for the events, manages extended events and prints the header according to the format.

The second kind of information in a Paje trace file is the type hierarchy. The PajeHierarchy class tries to simplify the type hierarchy definition by receiving a file in the Property List format with some reserved words and prints the type hierarchy defined there in Paje trace file format.

This class also manages the aliases for objects created in Paje trace file. Aliases can be used to downsize the trace files for Paje.

The third kind of information of a Paje trace file is the events that build the visualization in Paje. To cover this third part we created a set of classes which are subclasses of PajeEvent class. Each of them receives information and properly prints itself according to the header specified with PajeHeaderCenter.

The already defined subclasses of PajeEvent can be extended adding new fields with extra information in the events. This extra information can be visualized in Paje with the Inspection Tool.