RE: Question for Provider Developers - It is possible to completely automate the process of writing a CMPI provider?

I presented a paper at the SNIA Storage Developer Conference entitled "Automatic Generation of SMI Providers".  It describes the method we use to automatically generate a provider based on the .mof files used by the Storage Management Initiative.  The paper is also supposed to be published with the Management Developers Conference that completed last week.  The SDC presentation should be available in one or two months.

In it I describe how we generate our provider from the .mof files.  We use SimpleWBEM along with a number of enhancements we wrote to do this.  The provider handles all data items but functions need to be coded individually.  In our case, the data items are populated by a separate service which monitors the state of our device and calls Pegasus when a change needs to be made.

This method may or may not be useful to others depending on how much customization is required.

________________________________
From: Steve Peters [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Monday, November 22, 2010 2:22 AM
To: Chatterjee, Biswapratap; Kirk Augustin; [email protected]
Subject: RE: Question for Provider Developers - It is possible to completely automate the process of writing a CMPI provider?

            Look at Cimple ( Simple Wbem). This comes very close to a tool to write a provider.

                        Steve Peters
                        PMC-Sierra

________________________________
From: Chatterjee, Biswapratap [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Sunday, November 21, 2010 10:50 PM
To: Kirk Augustin; [email protected]
Subject: RE: Question for Provider Developers - It is possible to completely automate the process of writing a CMPI provider?

Hi Kirk,

Thanks a lot for the reply.

I exactly thought in the same lines as you do, but then if the developer also had the option to share some information about its data source (binary from where the provider expects data); like a stub sitting in-between the data source and provider (providing a generic interface to gather data), and a mapping document (like an xls sheet) acting as a meta-information which directs the automation process to generate codes mapping provider properties to the data source's properties.

I don't know whether these things are possible. I am just throwing ideas, maybe we hit something. I just want to know the possibilities of such an idea.

Regards,
Biswapratap.

From: Kirk Augustin [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Monday, November 22, 2010 12:04 PM
To: Chatterjee, Biswapratap; [email protected]
Subject: Re: Question for Provider Developers - It is possible to completely automate the process of writing a CMPI provider?

And I think the answer is no.

Whenever I need to write a provider, I always start off with the same boiler plate basic provider, but there is no way to automate the creation of the rest.
Some is hardware specific, data persistent specific, protocol specific, relative to other machines, relative to processes and their states, etc.
HP had an SDK to make producing a provider much easily, but there will always be a need to write a significant portion of any provider yourself.
You can automate the created of a provider to satisfy a schema, but that only creates objects with storage space for property values.   It can't ever fill in the property values.  You always have to write the code to do that.

Kirk & Trish Augustin
11821 NW McNamee Rd
Portland, OR 97231


________________________________
From: "Chatterjee, Biswapratap" <[email protected]>
To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
Sent: Sun, November 21, 2010 9:36:05 PM
Subject: Question for Provider Developers - It is possible to completely automate the process of writing a CMPI provider?
Hi all,

This question has been banging in my head for quite some time. "It is possible to completely automate the process of writing a CMPI provider?"

I have been putting lot of effort in making this possible. Since, I have always believed that writing a provider is a repetitive task. If it is a standard,
then we have a set of guidelines to write it, we just have to develop an intelligent software who can understand the guidelines on its own and
automate the process of provider development. The developer should only worry about the schema diagram that abstracts its
hardware/architecture. Something like - "Draw your schema and get your provider shared object".

If you feel this is an interesting topic than we can take this discussion to the next level about - "Possible ways to accomplish this objective".

Waiting for your replies and ideas ....

Regards,
Biswapratap.