Visualisation

Inspired greatly by Gregor and Erik's great talk at TSSJS 2006 we've started to add some visualisation plugins into Apache ServiceMix.

Component and Endpoint visualisation

There is a <dotViewEndpointListener/> listener plugin which can be added to the <listeners> element of the <container> tag which generates a DOT file representing the components and their endpoints.

MessageExchange flow

<dotViewFlowListener/> is another listener which generates a graph representing the message exchanges flow within the container.

Configuration

The following example shows how to configure a simple visualization listener.

A note for OS X users

If you are using OS X then you can open the DOT file using graphviz which will then automatically re-render if it changes, so you end up with a real time graphical representation of the topic and queue hierarchies.

Also if you want to edit the layout a little before adding it to a wiki to distribute to your team, open the DOT file with OmniGraffle then just edit away

Visualisation Wish List

There are so many different things we could visualise; our only limitation is our imagination. So if you have any ideas for what we could visualise please add something to our Visualisation Wish List