roadmap: near future

[Tom]

Hi,

first of all I would like to thank the developers of nconf for their great piece of work! Its an initial release and most of the software works as expected! Congratulations!
I read the roadmap of the project and noticed that major enhancements are foreseen:

# perl-API for the database
# bulk import functionality

I think these features will be important for an enterprise ready solution.
Questions:

What do you think what "near" future means? Next month (which is April and quite cool if you release) or next year?

Are there any existing code snippets for the planned enhancements? If so, is there public SVN Access? I`m really interested and able to help if you want...

thanks in advance,

best regards from germany,

Tom

[agargiulo]

Hi Tom

Thank you very much for your positive feedback!! We are very happy to hear that the tool is actually doing some good out there. It makes our effort seem worth while.
After the first release of NConf, we realized pretty quickly that there is a great need for people to import their existing Nagios configurations into NConf. That is quite a challenging feature, since an automated import mechanism would require a very stable and fault-tolerant parser.

We are currently working on a company internal project to merge many additional systems into our existing Nagios platform. For this we will require several import-scripts and batch mechanisms. We are not primarily working on a Nagios importer (yet), but we are currently developing a perl-API which will handle all database operations. This is essential since the database structure is very abstract and we cannot expect users to have to fully understand the database in order to do simple import/export operations. This API is currently in alpha-state, and there are still several features missing. Once the API is able to reliably add and link items in the database, we will make it available as part of the ordinary NConf release. It will then be very easy for users to develop their own import/export scripts, maybe even a fully-featured Nagios config importer.

The time range we are talking about in the "near future" will be approx. the next 1-3 months. We currently do not have a public SVN repository, as we would like to limit the development circle, in the beginning at least. If you or anyone are seriously interested in contributing though, email either one of us at our users.sourceforge.net address, and we'll discuss it privately. We would definitely be interested in someone who is willing to help with a Nagios import mechanism, once the API is a bit more complete.

Thank you for your interest!

Regards,
Angelo

[agargiulo]

An update on this: We will be releasing a BETA version of the API with NConf 1.2.5. With this release we will also supply a preliminary implementation of an import mechanism. Importing is currently a set of tasks to be performed by the user. In the future we plan to make it more user-friendly.

More information can be found here (work in progress):
perl-API: http://apps.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/n ... ?title=API
Import: http://apps.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/n ... port_guide