The Operating Tool – a Framework for Monitoring and Control of Heterogeneous Data and Workflows

Abstract

The Operating Tool (OT) is a graphical user interface to monitor and control heterogeneous data and workflows in distributed services. It has been designed as a configurable framework with a flexible set of re-usable views, which can be instantiated to communicate with the remote services over a wide range of protocols as CORBA, CIP, SOAP, LDAP, HTTP, and the file system. The implementation profits from an architecture using parameterised building blocks, based on the Model-View-Controller paradigm, that are assembled using a very simple but powerful XML configuration file syntax. Displaying and having access to the interfaces of several services within one tool enables the user to track the stages in the production process and monitor the status across service boundaries. In case of an error, the operator can interact with the process at the location that caused the problem.