Online server console viewer with Ajax long polling.

This post will give you small web application which brings the real time server console to the browser.  I am going to explain you, how to run this web application as it is and also if you want to add more customization, how to build the project using the source.

The Comet concept

This application a demonstrative usage of the Comet concept introduced by  Alex Russell in 2006. Once you get the idea, you can develop innovative applications and make use of it with your web application. For example, Facebook, it shows new friend requests, inbox updates and notifications on time. That is one of the real time usage of Comet approach.

The Comet is a web application model which always keeps live  connection with the server and let the server push the data to the browser through that connection. The browser does not explicitly request specific data. It just keeps live connection with the server. What ever the data pushed (or published) by the server are carried to the browser through that open connection. Also this concept is know as Ajax-Push, Reverse-Ajax, Two-way-web, HTTP Streaming, HTTP-server push.

There are several  ways of implementing Comet model. The CometD is a java framework  developed by Dojo Foundation which implements the Comet concept with 'XMLHttpRequest long polling'. This works with all modern browsers which supports XHR. With XHR long polling, the browser makes an asynchronous request to the server and if there are data available at the server, the response will bring that data to the browser as XML or JSON. After processing the response at client side, browser makes another XHR to poll more available data from the server.

If you have frequent data changes on the server and want to update browsers, the comet approach will be a best fit, because this can be pretty network intensive, and you often make pointless requests, though nothing has happened on the server. For example, frequent stock market information can be published to many users as soon as latest information is available. 

How the application works?

This application keeps reading the specified server log file line by line and push collected chunk of lines to the browser as a one string. By default, the application reads the Tomcat's catalina.out file. Server runs a timer which is set to every one second and executes these log file reading function. It collects  all the lines read within a one second and push to the client. In the client side, application keeps appending new contents to HTML DIV element. The server function will always reads only the newly appending lines of the the log file.

How to run the application?

If you are using Tomcat, you can experiment this application without much worrying. You just need to download the 'console-viewer.war' file and deploy it in your Tomcat container. If you are testing this with your local configuration, point your browser to following URL.

http://localhost:8080/console-viewer

Click on 'Connect' button and keep looking while you are accessing some deployed application. You will see the Tomcat's console on your web browser. Keep in mind, by default, this application reads 'catalina.out' file. So you need to start the Tomcat with ./startup.sh command. If you are appending your application's logs into different log file or using different server, I will explain, how to customize the application for that later. 

How to build the project with source?

I have provided complete source to you so that you can download the source code and go one step further or to read different log file or run with different server other then Tomcat. You can build the project using maven. If you are not using maven, you can create your own simple web application and copy the required contents. If you want to get the set of .jar files, you can get it from console-viewer.war file.

Here are the steps to build the project using maven.

Download the source and extract it to some where in your local disk. 

1. Navigate to the location.

    cd /home/semika/console-viewer

2. Build the project with the following command.

    mvn clean install

You can see, it builds the project and copies the 'console-viewer.war' file into CATALINA_HOME/webapps folder.  

3. Start the Tomcat with the following command.

   ./startup.sh

If you want to read some other log file rather than default 'catalina.out' file, or you want to run this application to view different server's console, you have to provide required log file's absolute path as an initialization parameter of 'Initializer' servlet as follows and deploy the application on the server.

<servlet>
    <servlet-name>initializer</servlet-name>
    <servlet-class>com.semika.cometd.Initializer</servlet-class>
    <init-param>
         <param-name>logFilePath</param-name>
         <param-value>
             /home/semika/apache-tomcat-7.0.37/logs/catalina.out
         </param-value>
     </init-param>
     <load-on-startup>2</load-on-startup>
</servlet>

Download the application and source

Download console-viewer.war file.
Download source code. If you encounter some issues with this, please send me a mail. I am always ready to give help.