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