I’m back!

I know it’s been a while since I posted anything here. I’ve been pretty busy helping some large financial customers, being a part of the CTO Ambassador team at VMware and preparing for VMworld. But now I’m back, and boy do I have some exciting things to show you!

One of the things I’ve been working on is a project that provides a framework for those who want to build their own portal in front of vRealize Automation. The framework also comes with a mobile-friendly reference implementation using jQuery Mobile.

This article is just a teaser. I’m planning to talk a lot more in detail about this and how to use the vRA API for building custom portals and other cool things. Below is an excerpt from the description on github. For a full description, along with code and installation instructions, check out my github page here: https://github.com/njswede/bosphorus

Background

This project is aimed at providing a custom portal framework for vRealize Automation (vRA) along with a reference implementation. It is intended for advanced users/developers of vRealize Automation who need to provide an alternate User Interface or who need to integrate vRA into a custom portal.

Bosphorus is written in Java using Spring MVC, Spring Boot, Thymeleaf and jQuery. The reference implementation uses jQuery Mobile as a UI framework. The UI framework can very easily be swapped out for another jQuery-based framework.

The choice of Java/Spring/Thymeleaf/jQuery was deliberate, as it seems to be a combination that’s very commonly used for Enterprise portals at the time of writing.

Why the name?

I wanted a name that was related to the concept of a portal. If you paid attention during geography class, you know that the Bosphorus Strait, located in Turkey is the portal between the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea. Plus is sounds cool.

Design goals

• Allow web coders to develop portals with no or little knowledge of vRA
• Implement on a robust platform that’s likely to be used in an enterprise setting.
• Easy to install.
• Extremely small footprint.
• Extremely fast startup time.
• Avoid cross-platform AJAX issues.

Features

Bosphorus was designed to be have a very small footprint, start and run very fast. At the same time, Bosphorus offers many advanced features such as live updates using long-polling and lazy-loading UI-snippets using AJAX.

Known bugs and limitations

• Currently only works for the default tenant.
• Only supports day 2 operations for which there is no form.
• Displays some day 2 operations that won’t work outside the native vRA portal (such as Connect via RDP).
• Only allows you to edit basic machine parameters when requesting catalog items. Networks, software components, etc. will be created using their default values.
• In the Requests section, live update doesn’t work for some day 2 operations.

Future updates

I’m currently running Bosphorus as a side project, so updates may be sporadic. However, here is a list of updates I’m likely do post in the somewhat near future:

• Support for tenants other than the default one.
• More robust live update code.
• Support for “skins” and “themes”.
• Basic support for approvals (e.g. an “inbox” where you can do approve/reject)

Screenshots