For the last weeks, i’ve been working a lot with different servers, which take longer and longer to deploy new application bundles. Mostly i know that the deployment is complete when the website or the webservices of that application are up and return a successful status code (not 404).
Another use case is when trying to access a remote website which is temporarily down, but you want to be notified immediately when it comes up again.
Since i don’t want to sit in front of my browser hitting F5 again and again (especially if it takes some minutes), i found it nice to watch the HTTP Server with a little script, which can run in background and send a little OS notification when the Site or Webservice is up again.
I’ll share it and hope anyone also has a use for this. For the notifications, you need the OS-independent notification library pynotify. If you are running Debian/Ubuntu, get it with apt-get install python-notify
#!/usr/bin/python
# Partly "borrowed" from:
# http://code.activestate.com/recipes/267197-urllib2-for-actions-depending-on-http-response-cod/
import urllib2
import pynotify
import time
import sys
from urllib2 import Request, urlopen, URLError, HTTPError
url = sys.argv[1]
print "Waiting for Site " + url + " to come up"
while True:
try:
urllib2.urlopen(url)
except urllib2.HTTPError, e:
if e.code == 401:
print 'not authorized'
elif e.code == 404:
print 'not found'
elif e.code == 503:
print 'service unavailable'
else:
print 'unknown error: '
time.sleep(3)
else:
print 'success'
if pynotify.init("HTTP Monitor"):
title_string = "HTTP Monitor"
author_string = "Site " + url + " is available"
n = pynotify.Notification(title_string, author_string, "emblem-shared")
n.set_timeout(0)
n.show()
print author_string
break
How the script is called:
python ~/tools/watchsite.py http://192.168.178.152:8080/UserService/UserServiceWSService?wsdl
Which looks like this:
Waiting for Site http://192.168.178.152:8080/UserService/UserServiceWSService?wsdl to come up....
And gives this nice notification (on Gnome) when the Server/Site/Service is up:
Flex: Show HTML text inside an Alert
As i just wanted to insert some bold text into an Alert box, I wondered why the Flex Alert doesn’t support HTML Text. So i wrote a Custom Alert class which just overwrites the regular
Alert.show(). Through a trick, it allows to use HTML tags inside the text.package tools { import flash.display.Sprite; import mx.controls.Alert; import mx.core.IFlexModuleFactory; import mx.core.mx_internal; /** * Alert-Box which makes using HTML text possible */ public class HTMLAlert extends Alert { /** * Given text is interpreted as HTML text, * Example: "bold text" is rendered as bold text. */ public static function show(text:String = "", title:String = "", flags:uint = 0x4, parent:Sprite = null, closeHandler:Function = null, iconClass:Class = null, defaultButtonFlag:uint = 0x4, moduleFactory:IFlexModuleFactory = null):Alert { var alert:Alert = Alert.show(text, title, flags, parent, closeHandler, iconClass, defaultButtonFlag, moduleFactory); alert.mx_internal::alertForm.mx_internal::textField.htmlText = text; return alert; } } }Just use it by calling it like the regular Alert-class:
HTMLAlert.show("A bold Alert text", "HTMLAlert", Alert.OK);Which then looks like this:
