Puppet users - Oct 2010 - Re: MCollective Client Languages (WAS Re: Re: Accessing Facter in other languages than Ruby?)

----- lists@truthisfreedom.org.uk wrote:
> We have a team of system administrators within our organisation who love
the
> look and power of MCollective but are currently "unable" to
utilise it fully
> as they don''t know ruby (for some reason Python is the language of
> choice here!).
> 
> I''m writing a new web interface for our change management system
that will be
> written in DJango, it would be really nice to be able to trigger
mcollective
> actions as part of a change request, but without Python bindings we need to
> run the SIMPLERPC sinatra client (and we need to make adjustments to it!)
so
> we can use a web interface to send a request to a second API that is
running
> on the same server as the original web interface (more on this at a later
date
> as I''m also planning on releasing it under a BSD-style license).
OK, yeah the REST thing is nice and all but its more a demo of what you can do
in
a specific use case, writing a truely generic REST bridge might have value I am
not
sure but it will be a PITA.

Ideally we''ll get other languages to be clients directly obviously
thats the
biggest win.

Are you using the SSL security plugin? It uses YAML and there''s some
sample Perl
code that speaks to mcollective - at least mc-ping - in ext, it should be easy
to make any language that has a syck YAML library to work with mcollective.

Eventually I hope to have some nice libraries in the usual suspects like Perl,
Python and PHP but really I dont know or dont care enough for those languages
to bother doing it.  I''d gladly help someone who is keen to write such
a
library though.

We should probably also consider making JSON based serialization an option for
this kind of thing though I quite like that the Marshal and YAML based plugins
preserve data types 100% but that also risk making the thing ruby specific so
it''s probably high time to make it so that we only support the
primitives that
JSON supports.
> As I''m currently the only SysAd that has even a vague idea about
Ruby
> within my organisation (and my idea of Ruby is very vague as those of you
who
> have seen my code will know!) I''m also the only person who can
extend
> MCollective and write new agents.  I''m also therefore the only one
who can write
> new clients for our support teams to use, where as if I could write
> clients in another language, I could hand out the work across the team -
infact,
> some of our support guys could even write their own tools!
The roadmap [1] covers some of what I have in mind for different languages,
essentially you''ll be able to write a small ruby wrapper that defines
the interface
of an agent but you can then provide the actions of an agent in any language and
even
use different languages to build up one agent.

The ruby wrapper could be made using a generator so you might not even need to
know
much of ruby.

Some way off still but thats the plan, 

[1] http://marionette-collective.org/roadmap/actions_in_other_languages.html

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