[Mailman-Developers] [GSoC 2012] Metrics

[George Chatzisofroniou]

Hi everyone,

Here's my new report [1] just before the midterm evaluation.

---
Ι am before the midterm evaluation and i’m having fun coding and
learning.

The project has reached the first version and achieves most of the
targets set. Specifically:

Metrics store is ready and it is designed in a way to make it easy to
add new metrics.  Every metric is either an event counter (eg posts
sent) or a measured level (eg number of total subscribers) and it is
stored in the database representing an interval of a granularity.
Special methods that retrieve counts for the specified interval or tally
the events with their effects (like a message sent or a new
subscription) are also completed.

Most of the graph tags are completed. In order to make it easy for the
designer to output the metrics he wishes, i have created a language and
its parser.  For example, if the designer wishes to output the data of
monthly number of posts for the last two years, he can easily extract
these counts as follows: “ {% EXTRACT AS graph1 %} posts MONTHLY FOR 2
YEARS {% ENDEXTRACT %} “. The whole syntax of tag’s language is defined
by a BNF Language description (you may find an earlier version of this
language in a previous post [2]).

Usually, the designer will add a template specification for the graph
tag and the returned values will be placed in this context, but is is
also possible to customize the way this context is presented or create
his own template (For example, he can easily change the date format or
publish the metrics through a table), since the ’EXTRACT’ tag actually
returns a complex data structure that can be used in any manner.

However, some templates are already created for the designer, with the
most significant to be the one that outputs the graphs. I used jqplot
library [3] (minimal and fast rendered graphs) to render the graphs. So, in
the previous example, to build the graph from the extracted data, the
designer simply has to add the following to his template: “ {% include
“MM3/line_graph.js” with dataset=graph1 title=’List Activity’ %}”, after
loading the appropriate plotting libraries (there are ready templates
that can be included to do that).

For both metrics store and graph tags, i have already created a number
of tests. But i still need to add even more.

There are some things that have not need be done yet and i’ll work on
them in the following days. I need to complete the implementation of the
language (there are some rules that my parser does not handle yet).  I
also want to create a template for bar graphs as well, design a
coalescor that will maintain the number of entries in the database at a
reasonable level and finish my generator that will generate the metrics
from scratch (a very first version is done). Last, i need to use
IArchiver to make a real connection with MM3 core (i currently use a
simulator for testing purposes).
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[1]: http://sophron.latthi.com/gsoc-mailman/?p=70
[2]: http://sophron.latthi.com/gsoc-mailman/?p=62
[3]: http://www.jqplot.com/


-- 
George Chatzisofroniou
sophron.latthi.com