Scanner Version 2.0
February 20, 2007 – 11:22 pmSo the scanner is now over a year old, I’ll be adding F-Secure’s scanner to it in the next few days. But I think it is nearly time for version 2.0 of the Scanner. My plan is a total rewrite, and this time in Ruby, actually it will probably be Ruby on Rails.
Have been doing some tests with Ruby to see if it possible to replicate the current scanner backend and so far it is looking good. Have a basic ruby class to handle some of the work of dealing with the scanners. I need to tinker with the architecture of things a little but I’m hopeful.
The basic 2.0 goal is to replicate the existing scanner in Ruby. Should be achievable, in the process I’m going to make the scanner backend a little more streamlined code wise and operation wise by multi threading the scanning process. This is a serious drawback of the current architecture, it doesn’t play well when multi threaded and the attempts to make it play well crashed and burned.
The initial plan is to get a working backend class for the bulk of the scanning operation. Then build the front end web code to handle uploads and result return. As with the current version results will be dumped into a database, then they can retrieved as required later. The current code I’m playing with generates the current version and signature stats that normally reside here in about a quarter of the time that it normally takes using the current backend code.
One of the enhancements to get added to 2.0 is a REST API element so I can use something like AJAX as a means to view the results in real time as they are dropped into the database, before finally showing the completed result.
