PHP screens starting to take shape for our new HA/DR products

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We have posted recently about the initial screen we had developed to front a new DR product we will be announcing soon call DR4i. We have continued to develop the screens adding a lot more data collection via PHP calls to our service programs.

The fact is we are having fun with this and learning as we go along, those of you who know me will know I am color blind, so if the colors offend don’t worry we are controlling it with CCS which will allow us to be a lot more flexible with screen design later down the road. We had been putting off developing a new set of interfaces for our products in PHP due to the complexity of setting up the IBM i PHP/HTTP server and felt many just wouldn’t bother. As it turns out Zend simplified things for those who want to run the HTTP/PHP server on the IBM i with their recent ZendServer announcement, plus we have had a lot of fun playing with the EasyCom server on our Linux server. The nice thing is we can port the code between the Linux Server and the IBM i with no changes at all!

I think the hardest thing we had to get over was how do we set up the php arrays to call our service programs especially where the data we needed to send and return would be in structures. Some correspondence with EasyCom and we now have that sorted.. Writing the service program which will run on the IBM i took us a few hours and the rest of the time was spent playing with the layout of the pages due to the non standard browser support provided by IE. The screens we show below are all from Google Chrome, I have to be honest and say it is fast becoming my favorite browser! Layouts for this browser were easy and we only started to see problems when we tried them in IE.

The last time we published the initial screen it was simply showing the status with no color coding or real active data, the following screen was captured after we had forced a number of errors in the apply process (not something we encourage) plus we suspended applying of a journal and ran a lot of change journal commands on the source. If we have any errors or queued receivers we will create links to a page which provides the details. This screen shows 4 errors and 9 receivers in the queue, all the other processes are running perfectly.

Main_Status_Screen
Main Status Display for DR4i

If any errors are reported we can drill down to find out the relevant information as shown in the panel below.

Error_Listing_Display
List of receivers which had apply errors

Then to display the error details you simply select the details link and the following screen is displayed.

Error_Details
Error Details returned by the APYJRNCHG

Finally if any receivers are sitting in the apply queue waiting to be processed (this can happen for a number of reasons but mainly when the apply process is suspended) you can see a lit of the receivers by selecting the number in the queue depth field which will show the following screen.

Apply Queue Information
Receivers Awaiting Apply

So this has taken a few days to complete but I think the results are acceptable. We have also started a foundation for all of our other products which will use the same technology for monitoring and eventually we will add control features to the interface to allow you to perform some of the operational requirements for the products.

If you would like to see a demo of the products or receive more information please let us know. A recent publication published our competitors product price for a P10 group, you will be surprised just how affordable our products are!

Chris…

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