Backburner Wiretap Server
This section explains how to develop a Wiretap client that can communicate with the Backburner managers and render nodes to view and manage jobs on the Backburner network in a custom manner.
Autodesk Backburner is a product-agnostic background job management system that allows multiple jobs such as, I/O operations, composites, and animation scenes to be processed by many computers working collectively on the same network. It is provided with many Autodesk creative applications such as, Flame, 3ds Max®, Maya, and so on. One of its major components, the Backburner Manager is actually a Wiretap server, so you can create a client application to submit, monitor and control rendering jobs on the network using the Wiretap SDK.
Similar to other Wiretap servers in the Wiretap network, the Backburner Manager exposes its database to Wiretap client applications as a tree-like hierarchy of nodes. In this case, the node types relate to background processing. These include the render servers, server groups, jobs and other elements that make up the Backburner network. By interacting with the metadata in these nodes, your Wiretap client can monitor and alter job status. You can easily suspend, restart or delete jobs, or re-assign them to a different render server or server group.
The Backburner Manager is well-known to Backburner users because it distributes and manages the jobs on the network amongst other tasks. You can interact with the Backburner Manager using the monitoring functionality built in to the Autodesk creative applications or Backburner Monitor. Using the Wiretap SDK, you can create your own client with similar or extended functionality.
This section begins with a few definitions, then examines the Backburner network architecture. Next, it presents the Backburner Manager hierarchy of nodes. It then presents the nodes that contain metadata by which you can monitor and alter job status including server, server group, job and job archive nodes. It explains how to list the Backburner servers on the network. Finally, it outlines how to create and submit a job. Sending attachments is also covered for jobs where large amounts of data are needed by the Backburner Manager and renderer.