The 'trace viewer', combined with the 'tracing server' which is part of the openccm module forms a web application that can be used to visualize execution traces between CORBA objects. The application is designed within the context of the COACH IST project. The next figure shows a simplified schematic of the architecture:
The trace viewer is designed and tested on the following platform:
fcgi.conf file - The 'trace viewer' must be part of a web server which communicates with the 'tracing server' using FCGI (persistent version of CGI). A seperate config file is used so that the web server will load the FCGI module, can send requests to the 'tracing server', and can find the 'trace viewer' web files'. The config file can be found within the traceviewer/conf subdirectory. The file must be modified to point to the location where this directory tree has been installed. It also specifies where the TracingServer is running (hostname and port).
Note: The fcgi module file can be found in the traceviewer/lib directory. It is a pre-build version for Apache running on a WIN32 machine. If you want to run the Apache server on a machine with a different operating system then you need to build the library yourself. The source code and documentation can be found on the fcgi home page.
httpd.conf file - The Apache web server must load the fcgi.conf file so it needs to be included at the end of the httpd.conf file which can be found in the Apache conf directory. This is how the include should look like:
Include "<absolute trace viewer path>/conf/fcgi.conf"
OpenCCM - To test the trace viewer you need to build and install the OpenCCM environment including the COACH test applications (trace server/service). There is a seperate target build coach that will build the OpenCCM code and the COACH software.
Apache - If the configuration files are correctly modified you should be able to (re)start the web server.
Browser - The next step is to start the web browser (IExplorer 5.5+) and type in the URL pointing to the traceviewer
http://<hostname>[:port]/coach/tracingIn case you machine does not have an installed Adobe SVG ActiveX control (version 3.0), you will be redirected to the Adobe SVG install page. Now you should install the SVG plugin on your machine. After the plugin is installed you will see the traceviewer HTML page which has 5 page control buttons and two sliders on the left side. When you see these, you know the viewer is loaded correctly. You also get an alert message that the viewer can not find the tracingserver. This is ok since the server is not started yet.
OpenCCM - After you have build and installed the OpenCCM platform you should be able to start the tracing server using the command 'coach_tracing_start'. The server is now ready to collect invocation events. To test the server together with the trace viewer you could run the test program 'coach_tracing_test'. This program simulates a number of invocation between CORBA components that can be monitored by the trace viewer. The result should look like follows: