Jolokia is a fresh way for accessing JMX MBeans remotely. It is
different to JSR-160 connectors in so far as it is an agent based
approach which uses JSON over HTTP for its communication in a
REST-stylish way.

Multiple agents are provided for different environments:

• WAR Agent for deployment as web application in a JEE Server.
• OSGi Agent for deployment in an OSGi container. This agent
  is packaged as a bundle and comes in two flavors (minimal,
  all-in-one).
• Mule Agent for usage within a Mule ESB
• JVM Agent which can be used with any Oracle/Sun JVM,
  Version 6

Features

The agent approach as several advantages:

• Firewall friendly

  Since all communication is over HTTP, proxying through firewalls
  becomes mostly a none-issue (in contrast to RMI communication, which
  is the default mode for JSR-160)

• Polyglot

  No Java installation is required on the client
  side. E.g. Jmx4Perl provides a rich Perl client library and
  Perl based tools for accessing the agents.

• Simple Setup

  The Setup is done by a simple agent deployment. In contrast,
  exporting JMX via JSR-160 can be remarkable complicated (see these
  blog posts for setting up Weblogic and JBoss for native
  remote JMX exposure setup)

Additionally, the agents provide extra features not available with
JSR-160 connectors:

• Bulk requests

  In contrast to JSR-160 remoting, Jolokia can process many JMX
  requests with a single roundtrip. A single HTTP POST request puts
  those requests in its JSON payload which gets dispatched on the
  agent side. These bulk requests can increase performance drastically
  especially for monitoring solutions. The Nagios plugin
  check_jmx4perl uses bulk requests for its multi check feature.

• Fine grained security

  In addition to standard HTTP security (SSL, HTTP-Authentication)
  Jolokia supports a custom policy with fine grained restrictions
  based on multiple properties like the client’s IP address or subnet,
  the MBean names and their attributes and operations. The policy is
  defined in an XML format with support for allow/deny sections and
  wildcards.

• Proxy mode

  Jolokia can operate in an agentless mode where the only requirement
  on the target platform is the standard JSR-160 export of its
  MBeanServer. A proxy listens on the front side for Jolokia requests
  via JSON/HTTP and propagates these to the target server through
  remote JSR-160 JMX calls. Bulk requests gets dispatched into
  multiple JSR-160 requests on the proxy transparently.

Resources

More information on jolokia can be found at www.jolokia.org.