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Network Monitor – Technical Information
1) Overview
Network Monitor is a powerful tool for the visualization and access of your data. It's heart is the VirtualGravity engine for the real time visualization of social networks and a powerful reporting tool for detail data and graphical representations of statistical informations. It is a tool for overview and detail all in one. It is a business dashboard and a personal business advisor. It is a tool for data representation and management. And all above it's a real time tool.
2) Architecture: Parts & Pieces
Network Monitor is a living example of a so called Rich Internet Application (R.I.A.), build with the Adobe Flex 2 framework. It consists of a client to be loaded in a web browser and a central database facility to house the requested data.
Using Network Monitor is as simple as pointing your web browser to any internet or LAN (local area net) location. The Network Monitor client is loaded into your web browser via the Adobe Flash Player™ plugin. Any communication and data requests are handled by the Network Monitor client with help of the web browser.
All you need is a PC or Mac with a network connection, and a web browser with the Adobe Flash Player™ plugin (version 9.0 or better). Adobe Flash Player™ was probably installed with your web browser and is available for a wide range of platforms and languages. (The installation of the plugin is tested as you start Network Monitor.)
The required data is housed at a central server facility that could be a single web server running a simple database or even a complex server cluster connected to a data warehouse. So, as with any other network service, the robustness of this service and the number of possible concurrent users is only limited by the technical limits of the server and its network connection.
The Central Parts
The central parts of Network Monitor and their distribution:
- A web browser with the Adobe Flash player™ plugin is used at the client side (local PC).
- The Network Monitor client application is loaded from a central web server.
- Data is requested from a central server, usually the same server the Network Monitor client application was loaded from.
- The local PC may be connected to the server by any TCP/IP network connection (internet, intranet, extranet, LAN, secure services, etc.).
- Server-client communication may be handled by a variety of protocols as XML, web services, binary data transmission.
- The database may be at the same server as the web server or any remote facility or cluster connected to the web server. (As Network Monitor is essentially a real time tool, the requested data might be collected and assembled just in time of the request.)
Benefits
- Central installation and management of all vital parts.
- Easy access and handling.
- May integrate with existing user authorizations.
- No problems with firewalls and filters (only standard HTML/swf/XML-content).
- No local client installations or incompatibilities after local system updates (as may be observed with JAVA).
3) System Requirements
The only system requirement is a web browser with the"Adobe Flash Player"-plugin, version 9.0 or higher.
"Adobe Flash Player 9" is available for the following platforms and web browsers (As of September 2007, Source: Adobe):
| Windows | |
| System versions: | Microsoft Windows Vista Microsoft Windows XP Windows Server 2003 Windows 2000 Windows Me Windows 98 |
| Web browser: | MS Internet Explorer 6+, Firefox 1.5+, Mozilla 1.0+, Netscape 7.0+, AOL 9, Opera 7.11+ |
| Apple Macintosh | |
| System versions: | Mac OS X v.10.1 or higher |
| Web browser: | Firefox 1.0+, Mozilla 1.0+, Netscape 7.0+, AOL for Mac OS X, Opera 6+, Safari 1.0+ |
| Processor: | PPC, Intel (Intel: Firefox 1.5.0.3+) |
| Linux | |
| System versions: | Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 3 update 8, RHEL 4 update 4 (AS/ES/WS) Novell SUSE 9.x oder 10.1 |
| Web browser: | Firefox 1.5.0.7+, Mozilla 1.7+, SeaMonkey 1.0.5+ |
| Processor: | -n.a.- |
| Solaris (Sun OS) | |
| System versions: | Solaris 10 |
| Web browser: | Firefox 1.5.0+, Mozilla 1.7.0+ |
| Processor: | Sparc, Intel |
Note:
This is the list of tested combinations given by Adobe. As Network Monitor doesn't need the full support of the "Adobe Flash Player" the list of supported browsers is probably longer than this.
"Mozilla 1.x" includes probably most if not all derivates of the Mozilla/Firefox browser. The same applies to Apple Safari (or WebKit) and most other open source browsers.
Flash Player 9 – Supported Languages
Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, English, French, German, Japanese, Italian, Korean, and Spanish.
Hardware Recommendations
As the real time generation of social network graphs requires some computational power, we recommend a PC with a processor rate of 1 GHz or higher. There is a special "economy" mode for older machines that performs with a lower load while providing good results.
4) Contacts
| mass:werk – media environments | ||||
| web: | www.masswerk.at | |||
| e-mail: | office@masswerk.at | |||
| FAS.research (data and consulting in network analysis) | ||||
| web: | Europe: | www.fas.at | US: | www.fas-research.com |
| e-mail: | Europe: | office@fas.at | US: | service@fas-research.com |
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