Wednesday, December 15, 2004

Java Management Extensions - critical for Enterprise Applications

Java Management Extensions or JMX for short have been around for a long time now (in technology time at least). I first came across JMX at JavaOne 2000, where a guy from Sun Microsystems France went through what it could do. It didn't take off then - although BEA and JBoss both added JMX to their servers. In the case of JBoss, JMX was crucial to the micro-kernel architecture and still plays a large part today - although they seem to be much more enamoured with AOP now! ;-)

I'm using mx4j and mc4j on a current project to really beef up the remote administration capabilities for one of my projects. It's working out well, although the lack of documentation around mc4j is an issue. I chose mc4j because I found the default HTML view from mx4j to be not enterprise-class and I like the dashboard feature in mc4j. I certainly don't like the netbeans dependencies though.. extending mc4j is needlessly complicated from a compile, build, test point of view..

Anyhow, I'm now at a point where I'm exposing many hitherto locked-down features of an application easily via the mc4j client connecting to the mx4j runtime as a JSR160 compliant application and it's working out well - next to get some dynamic charts working using jfreechart!

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