We're working on adding a Web Administration Panel to Circus. Like many tools out there, the idea is to let you control Circus from the web.

This new feature is currently built with:

• The Bottle Framework -- A one-module wsgi framework.
• The Sparkline jQuery Extension -- A JS lib to draw cute little charts.
• The Circus Client class, that let you connect to a Circus system and interact with it via ZMQ messages.

The prototype currently does AJAX Polls to update the data on the page every second, but a lot of things are being worked out to improve this.

For instance, the web app keeps in memory the last 100 stats calls in order to build the charts series, and serves them to the clients on every poll.

We're going to change this by collecting and building the series on the client only.

We'll also add a bit of Memoization so we serve back the same stats values in a given timespan to avoid overloading Circus with web stats calls.

This is especially important when the Web UI displays charts for hundreds of processes.

And err... we need to make the UI pretty and usable. I am doing my best here, but let's face it -- I suck at CSS :)

If you are a designer and want to help there...

You can see a screencast of the prototype here: http://blog.ziade.org/circus-web-panel.m4v

This screencast was built with the crypto demo of the Powerhose project at: https://github.com/mozilla-services/powerhose/blob/master/examples/crypto.ini

This demo runs crypto workers, a broker, and a web app.

In this screencast I do the following:

1. connect the Circus Web Admin app to a Circus system
2. check how the processes of the workers watcher do
3. add & remove some processes
4. start & restart the web worker

Links:

• the doc: http://circus.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html
• the repo: https://github.com/mozilla-services/circus

Please let us know what you think !