Having just returned from JBossWorld and
having had some very fruitful discussions with the JON team, Alan Santos
and Charles Crouch, it was suggested that we (Union Pacific Railroad) register
with the RHQ project and submit some of our internal research here, so
as to be considered for inclusion into future releases of JON. I
am not entirely clear on the best way to submit code as I am not sure whether
these constitute "bugs" or are more complicated feature requests.
Will await guidance before proceeding on these.
I have three specific issues to cover
on the product that concern two specific JON or RHQ plugins; the
Generic JMX plugin and the Tomcat plugin
1) The "extensibility"
of the Generic JMX plugin is a problem because some the class members are
declared "private" and really should be "protected".
If they aren't obvious from the code samples we can provide, I can
confer with my internal developers as to what specific class members are
applicable.
2) Ability to attach to a local
JVM's MBean server without the need for a JMX remoting. We have written
a new Generic JMX plugin that makes use of the Java Attach API to enable
the RHQ agent to discover JVMs that are not exposed via JMX remoting. These
JVMs must be running under the same OS user account as the agent. This
is critical to large enterprise operations that do not want to manage hundreds
or thousands of JVM JMX ports and all the security implications that entails.
This will also allow us to use JON/RHQ to manage our vast array of
Stand Alone Java process. I have code I would like to submit that
demonstrates this. The idea is that it should, most likely, be rolled
into the standard Generic JMX plugin
3) Expose Tomcat JNDI Datasources in
the Tomcat Plugin. This has notoriously been missing from the standard
Tomcat plugin in JON 2.x and RHQ 3.x. It exposes deployed applications
but not container configured datasources. I have a sample Tomcat
datasource plugin, but I imagine it should be part of the standard Tomcat
plugin.
Of lesser concern are:
1) Allow for re-deployment of applications
to Tomcat. Today, if an application already exists, the deployer
throws an error that it already exists, forcing you delete the application
and the deploy it again in a two step procedure. Should be able to
simply redeploy any war file. Probably a bug and will enter a bugzilla
report if I cannot find a reference to it the bug reports but may be a
"feature request", not sure. This may already be in RHQ
4.0...
2) Ability to use custom startup scripts
and pass parameters to them for the stop/start/recycle for the standard
JBoss EAP/EWP plugin. Today, you cannot pass any custom startup parameters
to JBoss EWP/EAP stop/start. This is probably a "bug" and
I can submit a Bugzilla report on it, if it has not already been addressed.
3) Standard Stand Alone JVM start/stop
plugin -- allows for a standardized script and GUI to start, stop, recycle
or get status info on any JVM process, container or not. The standard
script contains start(), stop(), recycle(), and status() that can then
call very detailed dependent scripts to manage the application lifecycle
of any JVM. A critical part of using JON to manage stand alone Java
processing. This is currently embedded in our re-vamped Generic JMX
plugin, but could/should be broken out into a separate plugin or added
to something else.
Regards,
David Webster
Union Pacific Railroad
Lead Architect-Web Infrastructure
Systems Engineering
Phone: (402) 544-1094 | Email: dawebster@up.com