Implement some kind of workspace recipe / macros

[Arkanosis]

It would be awesome to have a way to automatically create tabs and graphs based on a source and hand-written recipe.

The recipe could be some YAML dialect with tree pattern matching, eg.:

My tab name:
    My graph name:
        - /My host name/System/Load/CPU usage/*
    My other graph name@stacked:
        - /My host name/System/Processus/searchserver-*/Memory usage/Average size
        - /My host name/System/Processus/index6-*/Memory usage/Average size
    My other graph name:
        - ^/foo.*bar(hello|world)(/[^/]+)*$@regex

Keep in mind though that we'd probably want to expose all settings (such as line color, opacity…) through the recipe, so the actual YAML dialect might end up being much more complex than that.

[Arkanosis]

Almost two years ago, @fthevenet and me had some IRL debates about a different approach, which would revolve around “scripts” or “macros” automating what a human user does manually.

I started implementing a PoC using directly the UI functions, which proved impossible to bring to feature-completeness. The main challenge was that binjr is built with the GUI in mind and does not provide an API to interact with it. We thought about building a workspace with the script and reloading it with binjr after every change, but even that would not be a quick win.

There's probably very little to keep from this PoC, but it has shown is how easily one could script in BinjrScript (actually, JavaScript) and interact with the Java code through GraalVM.

Scripting probably puts the bar too high for some users, so even though I personally still believe this is a good answer to tedious / repetitive workspaces construction, the approach itself is not a silver bullet.