NAME

Supervisor - A process to supervisor other processes

DESCRIPTION

A supervisor is a process that controls other processes. One of the most well known ones is /sbin/init, which is ran by the *nix kernel to set up the initial environment. Init is also used to monitor and keep processes running when they exit.

While this supervisor is no replacement for init, it does share some of those characteristics. A daemon that runs in the background, monitoring a series of processes, restarting them should they exit. It also has a command line utility to start, stop, stat and reload a monitored process.

To do this, the supervisor is broken up into three parts. Each part is represented by an object. Each object is a based on a POE session and the events that they can respond too.

One part has the concept of a managed process. It contains the neccessary methods and events to control a process. When a process exits, an event is generated and sent to the supervisor.

A second part has the ability to allow access from external utilities to the managed processes. This allows utilities to start, stop, stat and/or reload managed processes.

And thirdly, there is a part that controls this interaction between the managed processes, external events and the neccesity of keeping those processes running.

So to do all this, the three parts are broken out over several modules.

Basic functionality is provided by these modules.

Supervisor::Base      - sets version number and provides documentation
Supervisor::Class     - defines the constants and common utilty functions
Supervisor::Constants - provides uniform constants for the environment
Supervisor::Log       - provides a common logging interface
Supervisor::Session   - provides a base POE session
Supervisor::Utils     - provides common utility functions

Process management is provided by these modules:

Supervisor::Process        - base module for a managed process
Supervidor::ProcessFactory - loads multiple processes from a config file

The external interface is provided by these modules:

Supervisor::RPC::Server    - provide an interface to the external world
Supervisor::RPC::Client    - used by external world to communcicate

The internal interface between processes and the external world:

Supervisor::Controller     - controls the processes and external access

These modules all combined togther make a supervisor that will keep a process running and allow control of that process from external utilties.

SEE ALSO

Supervisor::Base
Supervisor::Class
Supervisor::Constants
Supervisor::Controller
Supervisor::Log
Supervisor::Process
Supervisor::ProcessFactory
Supervisor::Session
Supervisor::Utils
Supervisor::RPC::Server
Supervisor::RPC::Client

AUTHOR

Kevin L. Esteb, <kesteb@wsipc.org>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright (C) 2009 by Kevin L. Esteb

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself, either Perl version 5.8.5 or, at your option, any later version of Perl 5 you may have available.