Hi All, I recently presented on kitty at the Los Angeles Java User Group, and I received some useful feedback from the group there that I wanted to share for discussion here. Kitty has a roadmap item for performing Tomcat-specific tasks such as working with objects in the Catalina MBeanServer. We want to make Kitty specific to managing Tomcat servers for the purposes of making it more production-ready, but the following viewpoint was expressed from LAJUG:
1) That it is extremely useful to have a command-line JMX Client 2) That the Tomcat-specific bits should be designed as a plugin, so that if they would like to use Kitty for administering something else, they aren't limited to Tomcat only I wanted to present this to the group, because it is essentially a change of focus for Kitty if we were to take such an approach. Kitty currently has a roadmap item to become more Tomcat-specific, although it is a completely generic JMX client at this point and will work with any JMX implementation. Then we would be making the Tomcat-specific administration bits a pluggable module rather than built into the utility, such that if someone wanted to adopt Kitty for managing Cassandra, Geronimo, or any other JMX-aware application they would have the freedom to write a module and do so. I personally think this should be fine, although I would still prefer to focus on writing Tomcat-specific plugins first, and anyone else can write other plugins for other apps if they so choose. I wanted to get the feedback for level of effort on making the Tomcat methods pluggable. It also raises questions on how do you load specific plugins, do we change the focus of the project, etc. Thanks, Matthew Sacks
