Tucker is a small library for gently and politely helping with the communication and management of application status.
Tucker contains two main parts. Firstly, a simple framework for building a 'status page', summarising a variety of information about the application, rendering it as an XML document, and perhaps serving it over HTTP. Secondly, a simple state machine describing the lifecycle of an application process, with ways to manipulate it, and ways to hook actions into transitions.
The second part does not yet exist.
With Gradle (http://www.gradle.org/). To build, simply do:
./gradlew build
This builds a jar file in build/libs. To use this in other projects, you might like to install it in your local Maven repository:
./gradlew publishToMavenLocal
The artifacts are signed with GPG key 83C61133, fingerprint 03EE E3B3 8FC8 2905 71C7 A7AA 7BB1 B35B 83C6 1133, owned by Tom Anderson <tom.anderson@timgroup.com>:
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You must create and configure an instance of com.timgroup.status.StatusPage. You must then expose this somehow. If you are writing a web application, that probably means using com.timgroup.status.servlet.StatusPageServlet.
For a concrete example of how to do this, see the Demo directory of the project. This contains a small, self-contained project which sets up and displays a status page. It obtains Tucker as a normal dependency, so you will need to install it into your local Maven repository, as detailed above. Then, run (from the root directory of the Tucker project):
gradle -b Demo/build.gradle clean jettyRun
When it starts, it will print out a URL that you should look at.
No. Tucker can interact with a variety of other APIs, and has compile-time dependencies on them. They are only runtime dependencies if you are using that particular interaction - they are, in a word, optional. However, Gradle does not presently let us express that. Consult the build.gradle file for hints on what might be optional.
Don't worry about that.
Tucker's role is, ostensibly, to present a simple summary of the status of a system to the outside world, but behind the scenes, it also bosses the application around. It is named after the character Malcolm Tucker (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thick_of_It#Cast_and_characters).