[Server-devel] XO Visualization Feature

[Martin Dluhos]

Hi everyone,

I would like to give you an update about XOvis, XO data visualization
application that I would like to integrate with XSCE. What is XOvis? It's
so-called couchapp- an HTML/Js application that stored and served from a Couch
database. The app uses HighCharts Javascript library to create charts from data
gathered from XO Journal backups on XS.

Recently, I have published a blog post on OLE's blog about deploying the app on
schoolservers in Nepali schools:

http://blog.olenepal.org/index.php/archives/842

There are two main parts of the application. First, there is a python script
process_journal_stats.py, which access raw Journal backup data from
/library/users and loads them into a couch database. This script lives in

http://github.com/martasd/xo-stats

Then there is the HTML/JS app itself, which visualizes the data stored in the
browser. This is the couch app which is also stored in the database itself. To
install the app, one simply needs to install CouchDB and then get the database
either through so-called replication or loaded from a db dump.

Thus far, I've been using Cloudant to host the database with the application,
but have run into errors when trying to replicate it from there. I am currently
in the process of setting up the publicly accessible instance on sunjammer,
where much of Sugarlabs infrastructure is hosted, but before that's available
the best option for installing the database is to load it from a db dump (which
I fetch from my GitHub repo).

To install the application, I've written deploy_xovis.sh, which I have now
translated into ansible's language, so that it can be integrated with XSCE. I
have tested it on 64 bit Fedora 18 and made sure it can be run idempotently
there. Currently, I don't have access to other machines to test the feature on.

I've added XOvis as a feature to

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XS_Community_Edition/Features#Features_Planned

and just created a pull request on GitHub which includes the ansible role
'xovis' as well as its corresponding tag. I am looking forward to working to
integrate this change with you!

Cheers,
Martin