Technical Blog Post
Abstract
Build your own ServiceProvider that provides resource preview based on OSLC specifications in no time
Body
Tivoli has a tremendous array of Systems Management applications, but we can't do everything! We need your help & your data, seamlessly integrated with Tivoli; and we want you to be able to seamlessly consume data from Tivoli. Customers want to see all of their data from all applications without setting up & maintaining difficult synchronization tools. OSLC UI Previews can help.
In this entry we are going to discuss the sample web applications that can aid you in implementing and understanding the OSLC specifications for ServiceProvider and UI Preview.
It's easy to understand the value by looking at some of the video examples that are available on our wiki, or trying the hosted beta . You might have even seen us demonstrating platform integrations at PULSE interoperability & integration center. These examples are based on the OSLC Core specifications for preview-ui, and further enabled by the JazzSM Resource Registry to quickly find the list of resources in your environment and available previews.
We have two example applications that can help you get started. The first provides UI preivews, and the second is able to consume the available UI previews. It's easy to customize these applications at various levels to prototype integration scenarios involving your own application.
GenericProvider
The application source is available here. The sample comes with a readme.txt that explains in full details and examples on how to get your own provider up and running.
PreviewDemo
This applications aims to provide a UIPreview for the resources registered by a ServiceProvider. The OSLC specification is available here. The UI Previews are clickable links which open up a window of some fixed size containing the preview of the resource that the provider chose to expose for this resource. As of this writing the window sizes doesn't take care of the actual sizes mentioned in the compact xml but you could always extend the implementation to have this.
We have used this as means of not only showing the UIPreview but as a debugging tool to see that compact xml confirm to the specifications and previews are working correctly.
These simple steps will also enable your data to dynamically appear in any UI-Preview Consumer. The application source is available here. It comes with a readme.txt that explains the full details and examples on how to get your own preview consumer up and running.
Once you have successfully deployed both the applications, you can use the sample UI Preview Application to show the preview from the sample GenericProvider:
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