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by: Bernard Teo








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Sun 03 Apr 2005

WebServer Monitor 1.0.6

Category : Technology/WebServerMonitor106.txt

I love the way the Mac OS X Cocoa API's work. It has, what I call, expressive power. You could think of an idea and find the constructs in Cocoa to express them and make them come alive, and it doesn't fight you or make you go through hoops. It's great.

I'm now just one step away from being able to do customisable log formats (if I can figure out how the interface should work). And being able to allow the user to set up the webserver, the way Postfix Enabler allows you to set up mail services.

Setting up PHP would be trivial. But setting up WebDav - that will allow you to use the webserver to store and share your iCal calendars, and from there, you'll start to see how all these little elements start to work in concert.

This 1.0.6 release will pave the way because it will give me the framework to turn features on or off the webserver in an orderly way, again much like Postfix Enabler.

This release also brings you, in conformance to the Apache "combined" log format that I'm adopting, the ability to track virtual hosts, traffic in the form of bytes served, status of hits (success or re-direct or page not found), as well as the ability to show or hide columns selectively.

You can download it now and use it while I figure out how to do the interface for customising the log format (among other things).

It'll still only read the log records from /var/log/httpd/access_log, though. Sorry, but if I solve this, I may be encouraged to think further about how to read the log records from anywhere else.

One more thing, WebServer Monitor will show only the records that have come in since you updated it to track the new log format (essentially the "NCSA extended/combined log format" with the addition of the virtual host field - "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-agent}i\" %v". For the ones that came before, it will (should) politely ignore them.

What's next - provide a way to filter by virtual hosts, and by page views (rather than page hits), and to show only the downloads. And the customisable log format stuff. And who knows? Stats and graphs - once I've learned how to draw graphs with Cocoa. Or figure out a way to accept plug-ins, so other people can supply the graphs.

Joe Mullins sent over some suggestions, including a mock up of how it all might work. Thanks. Step by step. I'll try to get there.

Posted at 3:33PM UTC | permalink

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