Dashboard Roles

"Dashboard" is an interesting name for a UI component, one floated in any discussion about user interfaces today. The trouble I have in understanding dashboards is the same trouble I have in understanding "cloud" — what do they do? Is there a generic version of the dashboard that I could take and apply to the UI I'm working on right this moment? Or, does "dashboard" simply capture the idea that important user information needs to be available to the user, at all times? Still, we're left wondering how to go about providing this dashboard component for application X because we don't necessarily know what information is important to our users, and what information needs to be monitored, collected, and presented to the user in real time.

Cloud Clients

The term cloud has many definitions in a computing context these days. Some refer to the various social networks as a cloud which I think is overly broad. Perhaps the best definition is the simplest; "a group of interconnected nodes". A "cloud" of nodes is a design construct, not a deployment one. The number of nodes and their respective locations should have no impact on the terminology used.

So what are the roles of these nodes that make up clouds? Typically, a node plays the role of a server. They act when they are requested to act. Users of these clouds are actually outside the cloud. The servers within the cloud then act on behalf of these client requests.

So is it possible to have these outside clients join into the cloud in order to share some of these computational resources? It certainly is and that is what peer-to-peer computing is all about. In this distributed computing model, the client is them most prevalent role in the entire system. Forget about the managers that allow these clients to discover one another. The manager are necessary but the clients taking on more than just a simple dummy role is what is interesting. It allows scale within the cloud to spread like disease.