1.4. A High Level Walk-Through

At the very top of the JBoss ON UI is a menu bar with, with five tabs that go to the major configuration areas of JBoss ON.

Each menu item relates to a different functional aspect of JBoss ON.

Rather than using drop-down or tabbed options, much of the configuration for JBoss ON is accessed through the left menu. There are individual tables that contain related areas of configuration, like users and groups, server configuration, server/agent connections, and content for the Administration area in Figure 1.4, “The Left Menu”.

Clicking the up or down arrows at the left of the menu tables collapses and expands the tables. This can make it easier to navigate the left menu.

The Dashboard is an overview of everything in JBoss ON, from recent actions (fired alerts and operations) to availability reports to newly discovered and imported resources. This page, unlike any other area of JBoss ON, is customizable so it can be used to display only the collection of information that you want to see. Each table of information is called a portlet, a mini-portal into a view of the JBoss ON server or resources. There can be multiple Dashboard views configured, with different portlets or different layouts; these are accessed by tabs at the top of the Dashboard page.

The Dashboard is the landing page for JBoss ON, the first page that comes up after login.

Some pages are essentially long tables of information, presented in basically the same way:

The inventory interface in Figure 1.7, “Inventory Browser” is rich with functionality. The search bar for resources and groups uses a specialized syntax and flexible dynamic search. Hovering over any resource name gives a small popup message with more information about that resource. Clicking the name of the entry itself opens its default entry configuration page, while clicking the name of its parent opens up that parent resource's configuration page.

In Figure 1.7, “Inventory Browser”, the UNINVENTORY SELECTED button is active because a resource is selected. If no entries are actively selected, activity buttons are grayed out.

Possibly the most functionality-saturated area in JBoss ON is an entry's details page.

The left navigation area shows the hierarchy, both parents and children, of the selected resource. This makes it very easy to navigate among all of the different services and servers that affect a resource.

Right-clicking any of the resources in the left navigation opens shortcuts to that entry's configuration.

The configuration area of a resource entry page (and other JBoss ON entities, like plug-ins and templates) has three information layers that provide all of the possible functionality and tasks available for that entry.

The entry's configuration page is tabbed according to each area that can be configured, and frequently has subtabs for additional configuration options and to show the history of that area (like fired alerts, previous content updates, or monitoring data).

The next section in the entry area shows lists of related configured entries for that task. For example, an Operations area will have a list of available operations in a table below the tabs. For Inventory, there is a list of configured child resources, while Alerts shows all of the configured alerts for that resource. All of those entries are listed in a table similar to the search results available in other parts of the JBoss ON UI.

Many elements are both a details page and an edit page. meaning that many fields are active automatically. This makes it possible to perform management tasks directly, without opening a separate page.

To the far right of the top menu is a small cluster of icons that provide very quick, targeted insight into JBoss ON.