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Bug 69773

Summary:	JMX-based SFS/lookup/etc. browser
Product:	apisupport	Reporter:	Jesse Glick <jglick>
Component:	Inspector	Assignee:	Martin Kozeny <mkozeny>
Status:	NEW ---
Severity:	blocker	CC:	jtulach, kitfox, sreimers
Priority:	P2
Version:	5.x
Hardware:	All
OS:	All
URL:	http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jglick?entry=mustang_agents_can_be_used
Issue Type:	ENHANCEMENT	Exception Reporter:

Description Jesse Glick 2005-12-02 19:50:42 UTC

It should be possible to create a module apisupport/agent (to be included in
harness cluster, perhaps? or platform?) which would register some JMX MBeans
that would serve up important runtime diagnostic info such as

- contents of SFS (incl. available instances, DataObject info, etc.)

- global lookup

- AWT focus information (see issue #31449)

- preferences

- module list

- maybe more...

Quite simple to do in JDK 6, using MXBeans. Trickier but still possible in JDK
5: could use Model MBeans (but I can't get them to work at all); or Dynamic
MBeans (cumbersome); or Open MBeans (reasonably powerful but a pain to set up).
Also in JDK 5 you apparently need to pass -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote to the
VM in order for management to work at all.

Ideally, information would be browsable in a crude form using just jconsole, if
you really needed to (e.g. for emergency field diagnosis), but with a richer
client available as part of a separate apisupport IDE module, e.g. displayed in
the Runtime tab.

Could serve as a complete replacement for the "bean browser" functionality in
apisupport, but usable even in platform apps.

Comment 1 sreimers 2006-02-18 19:39:04 UTC

Maybe you already know this - but here is a nice tool http://mc4j.sf.net - it is
based on NetBeans and contains generic access to JMX - try it out it may be a
starting point at least

Comment 2 Jesse Glick 2006-02-18 20:23:26 UTC

Re. MC4J - interesting. Not directly usable but I will look to see if there are
some tricks I can use from it. Thanks for tip (I had heard about it long ago but
forgotten).

Comment 3 sreimers 2006-02-18 20:57:09 UTC

Sound like an interesting project. Since I am developing a rich client
application based on NetBeans RCP I am interested in anything you dig up. Maybe
I can even help out with something?

Comment 4 Jesse Glick 2006-03-03 17:51:12 UTC

Re. last comment: perhaps. It's up to me to get things rolling and create the
basic framework and some inspection hooks. Don't have time to work on it
immediately but I hope sometime this year. Then it should be relatively easy for
people to add additional mbeans (or whatever) according to their needs and
corresponding GUI visualizers from the IDE.