Web administration console

1 What is it?

The JPPF web administration console is a web-based functional equivalent to the desktop-based console, with a few significant differences:

• it has all the features of its desktop counterpart, except for the charts, which are not implemented yet
• it is multi-user and handles both authentication and authorizations
• its configuration is manageable from its own administrative user interface

The web administration is based on the Apache Wicket 7.x web framework, which requires a servlet container supporting the servlet 3.0 specification. As for the current version of JPPF, Java 7 or later is also required.

2 Authentication and authorizations

2.1 Authentication

The web administration console uses form-based, container-managed authentication. This means that user credentials (user name and password) are entered via a login screen and then validated by the web-or application server, using the mechanisms exposed by the server.

2.2 User roles

The web administration console defines 3 user roles, each with its own set of associated authorizations:

• jppf-monitor: users in this role can only observe the state of the grid and of the jobs that run in it. They cannot stop/restart drivers or nodes, change their configuration, start slave nodes, suspend or cancel jobs, etc. Actions that are not permitted will always be disabled in the toolbars. Pages that are not allowed will not be displayed in the navigation bar on the left side.
• jppf-manager: users in this role have all the permissions of the "jppf-monitor" role along with the rights to change the state and behavior of the grid, including drivers, nodes and jobs.
• jppf-admin: users in this role have access to an administration screen not visible to other roles, which allows them to change, import and export the JPPF congfiguration of the web admin console and to restart the underlying JPPF client to take configuration changes into account. A user with only this role will only see the administration screen. Therefore, it is recommended to use it in combination with one of the other two roles.

2.3 User roles mapping

The task of mapping users or groups to application roles depends almost entirely on the application server in which the web console is deployed. For those servers that require a specific deployment constructor to specify roles mapping (currently Glasfish and Weblogic), such a descriptor is provided and included in the .war file. In any case, you should follow the specific server's documentation to define a user registry and/or map it to the JPPF roles.

3 Supported application servers

The JPPF web admin console has been tested on Tomcat 7.0, Jetty 9.2, Glasfish 4.1, Wildfly 8.2, Websphere Liberty Profile 16.0.0.3 and Weblogic 12.1.3. It is designed to work on any servlet container that supports the Servlet 3.0 specificiation.

4 Building from the source

The JPPF web administration console is distributed as a self-contained module and includes sources, required libraries, deployment descriptors, resources and build scripts. As for any JPPF module, the web console is built with Apache Ant. It is recommended to have Ant 1.9.0 or later installed before building.

To build, simply unzip the JPPF-x.y.z-admin-web.zip file into a directory of your choice, then open a shell in the resulting JPPF-x.y.z-admin-web folder. In this shell type "ant build" or just "ant" to build the JPPFWebAdmin.war file. The file is created in the build/ sub-folder. The application resources, especially the deployment descriptors, are found in the webapp/ sub-folder.