VVI has announced the availability of “The Signal Framework.” The Signal Framework is a robust and optimized high-level API programming framework specialized to time signals, Ed VanVliet, VVI’s director of application development, told MacCentral.
It can be adapted to nearly any time varying source in a matter of minutes, he said. Data is stored in a circular buffer and graphed in real-time. The acquisition section is multithreaded to produce real-time results without sacrificing user interface quality, VanVliet said. There can be many signal channels and the time bases can be nonuniform. The signal history can be scrolled back and forth for viewing in real-time while new signal values are being acquired.
“Since the Signal Framework is based on the powerful OpenGraph visualization framework it can be adjusted to nearly any type of specification desired,” VanVliet said. “It has been used in many applications including high-speed instrument control, financial analysis, network troubleshooting and system resource monitoring and can be adapted to many other types of uses.”
At the same time, VVI has upgraded the Vving application based on user feedback. The previous version expired so anyone that was using it should get this next version (version 1.1), VanVliet said. Vving is based on The Signal Framework and demonstrates some of its features.
“The interesting thing about that framework is that the section of code that deals with the data acquisition is compact so with the change of a few lines of code it can display signals from other sources in a format just like Vving does,” VanVliet said. “For instance, it could display multiple-CPU usage in different channels, but in a format that is much more professional than the CPU Monitor application that is provided with Mac OS X.
Vving is a front-line diagnostic tool that graphs the response of any computer on the Internet in real-time. It runs on either Mac OS X 10.1 or Mac OS X Server 10.1.
“Vving provides an immediate solution with no learning curve, something everyone appreciates,” John Brilhart, chief technical Officer of VVI, told MacCentral. “It also demonstrates the high scalability of our OpenGraph programming framework. For example, Vving can display millions of points in real-time and show data ranging from seconds to years. Although Vving shows just a small portion of the OpenGraph features I think it is a good application to demonstrate OpenGraph. Starting today we are providing complimentary copies of Vving by order via the Internet for that purpose.”
Every second, Vving sends a signal to a remote computer and waits to receive it back in an echo fashion. It then graphs how long it took for the echo to return and what portion of the echo returned. The graph is updated for every echo received, which is once per second in the current implementation. Running it all day long produces over 80 thousand points that need to be plotted in real-time.
Vving costs US$49. However, it’s free to anybody that wishes to supply basic customer information and is using it for demonstration purposes.