Walter

Walter is a project within the Architecture Unit at the CRC for Distributed Systems Technology. Named after Walt Disney, it provides an animated view of objects (ie. servers and clients) in an event domain. A bigger picture shows more details of the display.

Walter uses notifcation of events to drive its animation. The current version recognises object start, stop and state change, and message send and receive events.

Objects may generate explicit event notifications which are distributed to subscribers by the event manager. The current version of Walter can subscribe to notifications from Elvin or Project Pilgrim's PEN.

Other potential event sources are currently being investigated. These include OMG's COSS Event Service, change monitors for things like DCE's endpoint mappper and directory service, process monitors, Web server usage monitors, etc.

A paper describing an early version of Walter and the event manager Elvin was presented at the SDNE'94 workshop.

Current work

extending Walter's animation capabilities
- improvement of message visualisation
- grouping of objects
- better object image support
- background images for animation plane
- user defined focus points for zoom out
- speed
dynamic update of configuration database
integration of additional event sources