NiceWeb is a web viewer of the state of the instruments in the NCNR.

Going beyond livedata, we include the ability to see the set of queued runs, individual motor movements and reported errors.

NICE servers run on the individual instrument computers. Each server will start a specialized client which feeds two proxies. One, running on an internal server, will have access to the complete set of NICE client capabilities, including moving motors and modifying the run queue. Another, running on an external server, will be view only, showing a filtered version of the information the NICE server produces.

The proxies will gather information from all instruments and present it using web push technology based on the socket.IO protocol. Individual browsers may use websockets, flash, or ajax to implement the push, but the server doesn't care.

The state of the instruments will be stored in a persistent cache. When a NICE server comes online it will update both the internal and external proxy with the instrument state. As motors move and counters count, the cache will be updated and the clients notified. New clients will receive a snapshot of the instrument state on connecting, and will be notified with updates as the instrument changes.

The cache technology doesn't matter. Either redis or memcached should work fine. We are using redis. The socket.IO server could be implemented in anything that supports socket.IO, including python, erlang, java, ruby or the node reference implementation. We will use a python solution.

We have the repeater for the device model, and a primitive interface to NICE command line. The web page is minimal.

TODO: Start the web proxy automatically with the server.

TODO: Support reboot of the repeater.

Install support packages for python:

Ubuntu:  sudo apt-get install virtualenvwrapper
Ubuntu:  sudo apt-get install python-tornado

RedHat:  sudo yum install python-virtualenvwrapper   # 2.3-3.el6
RedHat:  sudo yum install python-tornado             # 2.2.1-1.el6

Use virtualenv to isolate the python environment:

Ubuntu:  source /etc/bash_completion.d/virtualenvwrapper
RedHat:  source `which virtualenvwrapper.sh`

Use virtualenv to isolate the python environment:

mkvirtualenv --system-site-packages niceweb

Note that you can use this virtual environment from eclipse by setting the pydev interpreter to ~/.virtualenvs/niceweb/bin/python.

To go back to this python enviroment later, or in another console, you need to again source virtualenvwrapper.sh, then do:

workon niceweb

TornadIO2 needs to be installed from PyPI:

pip install tornadio2

Grab server and dependencies:

git clone git@github.com:scattering/niceweb.git
git clone git@github.com:scattering/jqplot.science.git
curl -o jqplot.1.0.3r1117.zip http://cloud.github.com/downloads/scattering/jqplot.science/jqplot.1.0.3r1117.zip
unzip jqplot.1.0.3r1117.zip
cd niceweb/static
ln -s ../../jqplot.science .
ln -s ../../jqplot .

Start the server using:

cd niceweb
./server.py

Point your browser to localhost:8001. You should see a mostly empty console.

In a separate terminal, start the fake instrument:

cd niceweb/test
./playback.py bt4.gz

This feeds a captured BT4 vm test session back to the server so you can see the measurement progress as it is happening.