One might think this must be a unlucky day. It wasn’t for me, at least until I came home today 😉
Work is very satisfying right now. I have to dig into several technologies that were new to me, because I’m going to impose JMX on our application. This is a rather challenging task, because the application consists of several distributed components, and unfortunately it’s an “identity management and security administration” application, so I have to be really careful not to break our own security. So, although I knew some of the technologies/APIs already, I learned a lot of new things about PKI, SSL, JAAS, JNDI, JINI, RMI, J2EE, SOAP, JPSs, Struts, Servlets, Application Servers like JBoss or Websphere, and finally JMX itself. After about two weeks of reading, playing around, testing, and comparing JMX implementations, a somewhat concrete picture of the implementation evolved, and I’m quite happy with it so far. I don’t have a 100 percent clear picture yet, but the most issues that troubled me are solved. One thing I’m still thinking about is how I’m going to manage the lifetime of an MBean, because most parts of our software simply rely on garbage collection and don’t have clear, designated “cleanUp” methods where I would unregister the bean. Another thing is the naming scheme of the MBeans, because I plan to implement a client which displays them in their natural hierarchy, and not just as a flat list. But I heard that JSR-77 proposes a nice naming scheme, I will read through these 190 pages on Tuesday. For now, I’m looking forward to enjoying this long weekend.
The unlucky part of this Friday 13th was the electricity bill I received today. I really need to get my salary raised.