Apache Axis2 JMX Front
Name: Chathura C. Ekanayake
Contact: [email protected]
School: University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka
Major: Computer Science and Engineering
Project: Axis2 JMX Front
Project Page: http://wiki.apache.org/ws/SummerOfCode/2005/JMXFront/
Mentors: Deepal Jayasinghe and Srinath Perera
Mentoring Organization: Apache Software Foundation (http://www.apache.org/)
Apache Axis2 is a highly extensible Java-based web-service engine. Its extensibility comes mainly from the handler chain-based architecture. Axis2 allows configuring these handlers and other feathers mainly using XML files. There was no proper way to configure these settings while Axis2 was running in servers. The goal of Axis2 JMX Front is to provide a JMX management interface for monitoring and configuring Axis2 at runtime.
Axis2 JMX Front consists of a management class (MBean) named Axis2Manager, which provides access to all configurable modules. It handles everything regarding configuring various modules and provides a simple interface. This MBean has the functionality to configure settings of handlers, transport protocol handlers, and deployed services. For example, administrators can use this interface to turn off selected operations from web services, after they are deployed. This MBean is registered in an MBeanServer and published in a JMXConnectorServer. Remote management applications (JConsole, JManage, and so on) can access this MBean using RMI and call any function it provides. Therefore, administrators of Axis2 can log on to this interface to monitor and configure the system while it is running in servers. They can also manage different Axis2 engines running in different servers as a collection (cluster) using this interface.
Axis2 JMX Front can be extended seamlessly with additional management functionality. Developers can add functions to the existing MBean or create separate MBeans without altering the rest of the code. After implementing a class with the required management functionality, they can call the methods of the JMXManager class to register and publish objects of those classes as MBeans. Example 1 illustrates the use of JMXManager for registering a normal Java object named 'myObject" as an MBean.
Axis2JMX Front uses the Apache commons.modeler package for registering MBeans. Therefore, MBean developers are not required to provide a separate interface for their management objects. JMX Front loads all the JMX-specific classes at runtime to make the Axis2 build independent of JMX libraries. It also provides a separate class named 'JMXAdmin" to handle all JMX-related features. Axis2 engine can load this class at runtime to JMX-enable the system. This allows Axis2 JMX Front to be deployed as an optional package, which can be integrated to Axis2 at deploy time.
DDJ
