Light Integrated Console
When so many advanced and innovative technologies are delivered, it becomes difficult to explain exactly what they offer to the user. Building consoles to communicate the various functions involves numerous resources and often a steep learning curve. Clearly, creating a better user experience can be a game changer for IBM when it delivers advanced technologies to the market.
LIC is a framework that answers the ongoing console needs of different projects in the department and can also be used as a Petri-dish for experimenting with new views and widgets that will allow the development of improved IBM consoles.
The major objective of LIC is to provide a rich set of sleek views and widgets. These can be leveraged by people developing system management technologies who want a jump start for their consoles.
Some of these views are:
- Thumbnails – shows resources as thumbnails.
- Deep-dive thumbnails – shows a variety of thumbnails that can be further clicked to show detailed information.
- Timeline – shows a set of events over a time line in a concept similar to Gantt charts.
- Messages area – updated periodically to show system messages.
Widgets include needle-meter, XY graph, progress bar, etc.
The LIC was designed to be light and have minimal dependencies, so it can be easily integrated into projects with no major interference work. LIC is based upon the IBM Solutions Console and the Lightweight Infrastructure (LWI/ISC), which are its only dependencies.
The LIC underlies the consoles of various projects: policy-based management, Reservoir 2009 CeBIT demo, etc.