Hi Geeks
During the last few weeks I discussed (mostly with Marc) how
to manage JBoss and Marc does not like the idea to use plain
JMX to manage JBoss.
Dealing with JMX the last month showed me that JMX is to much
overhead with regards to coding and needs to much performance
to provide a good administration environment as long as the admin.
tool is written in Java. And the bigger App. servers like WebSphere
or Weblogic comes with a Java admin. tool.
Goals:
- has to work not only for JBoss
- is transport protocol independent (WebSphere uses their OSE
and Weblogic their T3)
- a central admin console should work with different vendors and
with different versions of a app. server -> versioning
I would suggest the following concept:
- the client has to be written in Java
- the client works through an Interface with the server
- the connection is protocol independent
- integrated support for versioning
- client works independent from the server's implementation
WebSphere uses EJBs and Weblogic I don't know
Client interface:
- support to lookup a server
- navigation through the server service trees (WAS and WL display
its services as a tree)
- working on a service interface (getting and setting of attributes,
invoking of methods and managing of notifications)
- support for monitoring which should be separat from administration
The server implementation of JBoss could look like:
- either JMX MBeans or EJBs implements the server-side administration
- are registered at the JNDI server
- delivers the service interfaces to the client and map the request to the
server-side components
- I would suggest RMI as a transport protocol
Why not JMX ?:
- I aggree with Marc that JMX is good when the client is not written in
Java but ugly when it is
- A good Admin. Console must be easy to use, fast and reliable and I
think this could only be achieved when the Client is written in Java
- JMX offers a weak interface which means that the interfaces described
must not implemented this way and this leads to a lot of runtime exception
(you don't know if a method signature is correct until you call it)
Have fun - Mad Andy / Better Pizza
Senior Java Developer
eBuilt Inc. (www.ebuilt.com)
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