The summer break is over and Jolokia is one step closer to
1.0. Germans might reasonably argue, ‘ehm, what summer do you talk
about ?’ but at least 0.95 is now a fact and introduces two new
features. Very cool features, IMO.
The Jolokia JDK6 JVM Agent is now able to use the Java Attach
API so that it is possible to dynamically attach and detach a
Jolokia agent to a running Java process, much like jconsole. It
is a really exciting and powerful feature, because it allows for
HTTP/JSON access without (permanently) instrumenting a Java process by
deploying an agent or modifying startup options, which is a major
obstacle for quite some users. The nice advantage over jconsole is
that it attaches locally but export the data remotely. Perfect for
headless server installations.
The second addition is the support for upstream serialization of all
OpenType types so that JMX operations and write requests can be
used with OpenTypes, too. For MXBeans special support has been
added, so that e.g. a JSON map gets properly translated to an MXBean’s
Map attribute (which in between gets translated to a TabularData
with a fixed format). Since MXBeans are so easy to declare, implement
and to register, this missing piece really adds to our JMX on
Capsaicin mantra.
Both features arrived via GitHub pull requests and are proofs for
the relevance of the social coding model introduced by GitHub. Big
acknowlegdments go out to Assaf Berg and Greg Bowyer for
providing patches which lead to these features.
This is probably the last release before 1.0, which is to be expected
before the end of September.