Some small goodies served by 1.1.1

This last feature release before work on 2.0.0 starts brings some small goodies.

• BigDecimal and BigInteger can now be used for operation arguments and return values.
• A new processing parameter ifModifiedSince has been introduced. This parameter can be used with a timestamp for fetching the list of available MBeans only when there has been some changes in the MBean registration on any observed MBeanServer since that time. If there has been no changes an answer with status code "302" (Not modified) is returned. This feature is also supported for "search" requests. In a future version of Jolokia, there will be also custom support for own "read" and "exec" request so that expensive operations can be called conditionally.
• For the JVM agent, if a port of 0 is given, then an arbitrary free port will be selected and printed out on standard output as part of the Jolokia agent URL. If no host is given, the JVM agent will now bind to localhost and if host of "0.0.0.0" or "*" is provided, the agent will bind on all interfaces.
• For the Java client an extra property errorValue has been added which holds the JSON serialized exception if the processiong parameter serializeException is active.
• The JavaScript client's jolokia.register() can now take an optional config element for specifying processing parameters for a certain scheduler job. Also, the new option onlyIfModified can be used so that the callback for list and search request is only called, if the set of registered MBean has changed. This is especially useful for web based client which want to refresh the MBean tree only if there are changes.
• The Expires: header of a Jolokia response has now a valid date as value (instead of '-1') which points to one hour in the past. This change should help clients which do not ignore according to RFC-2616 invalid date syntax and treat them as 'already expired'.

Links to the corresponding GitHub issues and the bugs fixed in this release can be found in the change report.

This is the last feature release in the 1.x series. Work has already started on exciting new features for Jolokia 2.0. E.g. JMX notification support is coming, an initial pull model has been already implemented (on branch notification). There are even more ideas and some refactorings will happening along with some modest changes in the module structure. So, please stay tuned ...

1.1.0 with Spring support and @JsonMBean

It took some time, but it was worth it. Along with the usual bug fix parade, several new features has been added to Jolokia.

A new module jolokia-spring has been added which makes integration of Jolokia in Spring applications even easier. Simply add the following line (along with the corresponding namespace) to you application context and agent will be fired up during startup:

<jolokia:agent>
   <jolokia:config
           autoStart="true"
           host="0.0.0.0"
           port="8778"
   ....
   />
</jolokia:agent>

More details can be found here in the reference manual.

The new jolokia-jmx module provides an own MBeanServer which never gets exposed via JSR-160 remoting. By registering your MBeans at the Jolokia MBeanServer you can make them exclusively available for Jolokia without worrying about JSR-160 access e.g. via jconsole. However, if you annotate your MBeans with @JsonMBean and register it at the Jolokia MBeanServer your get automatic translation of complex data types to JSON even for JSR-160 connections:

The details can be found here.

Several new processing options enter the scene. These can be given either as global configuration parameters or as query parameters:

• canonicalNaming influences the order of key properties in object names
• serializeExceptions adds a JSON representation of exceptions in an error case
• includeStackTrace can switch on/off the sending of an lengthy stack trace in an error case

That's it for now, all changes are summarized as always in the change report.

Some other, more organizational stuff for now:

• Bugtracking and feature requests switch over completely to Github. Since I'm currently collecting features for 2.0, it's a good time for feature requests ;-). All ideas entered at jolokia.idea.informer.com has been transformed into Github issues.
• If you are close to Germany it might be of interest to you, that I'm giving a training on Jolokia and Jmx4Perl, with focus on Java Monitoring with Nagios. This will happen at 16./17.04.2013 in Munich, details can be found on our web site (in german).

And finally a very hot recommendation: Please have a look at hawt.io a super cool HTML5 console which uses Jolokia for backend communication exclusively. Most of the new ideas included in this Jolokia release were inspired by discussions with James Strachan, one of the driving forces behind hawt. Thanks for that ;-)

1.0.6 cosmetics

Although it has been quite calm in Jolokia land for some months, there is quite some momentum around Jolokia. This minor release brings some cosmetic changes, mostly for tuning the ordering within MBeans names and some JavaScript fixes. More on this in the changelog.

Some other tidbits:

• The new Talks and Screencast section collects some fancy multimedia introducing Jolokia
• I'm going to talk about Jolokia at jayday 2012, a brand new, low cost conference in Munich on 3th December 2012. Hopefully there will be some brand new stuff to show, too.
• Some completely irrelevant stuff: Jolokia T-Shirts can be found in the Jolokia Shop The shop was too easy to setup for not doing it ;-) And they look freaking hot ....

Cubism support in 1.0.5

Jolokia 1.0.5 has been released. Beside minor improvements and bug fixes, one great new feature has been introduced: As already mentioned Jolokia has now support for Cubism, a fine time series charting library based on d3.js. Cubism provides support for an innovative charting type, the horizon charts:

A very cool live demo where a Jolokia JavaScript client fetches live data from our servers and plot it with Cubism can be found on this demo page. The documentation can be found in the reference manual.

Jolokia uses also a Travis build in addition to our own CI Server. (Did I mentioned already, that we have a quite I high Sonar score ?). Travis is a quite nice supplement to Github, and brings CI testing to a higher level.

That's it for now. The next months of my open-source work will be spent now on Ají, Jolokia's new fancy sister. Sorry for pushing thinks like notifications down the Jonlokia back-log, but it's not forgotten.

1.0.4 introduces a Javascript request scheduler

Beside some bug fixes two new features are included in this new release:

Jolokia's Javascript library has now a scheduler for periodically querying the agent. Requests can be registered at the agent and all registered requests are sent at once in a single bulk request periodically. This is especially useful when building up dashboard like web pages with multiple charts.

The folowing example registers two requests which are called every second. The reference documentation has all the details.

var jolokia = new Jolokia("http://localhost:8080/jolokia");

          // Register request along with callback printing out
// the heap memory usage
jolokia.register(function(resp) {
   console.log("Memory: " + resp.value);
},{ 
    type:"read", 
    mbean:"java.lang:type=Memory", 
    attribute:"HeapMemoryUsage", 
    path:"used"
});

// Start the scheduler for calling the request every second
jolokia.start(1000);

The scheduler is used by the new Jolokia-Cubism integration for plotting real time JMX data. Please have a look at the demo page for more information about using Jolokia together with Cubism.

On the agent side detectors now support custom options. The first option available is for the Glassfish detector to prevent booting of the AMX subsystem, which registers the most interesting MBeans. AMX is booted now by default on the first request when running in Glassfish. For more information, please refer to the WAR configuration options in the reference documentation.

Ají moves on, too, although slower than expected. The main focus of the next months will to be bring that Javascript JMX application on and out. Stay tuned ...

1.0.3 with CORS support

This minor release adds cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) support to all Jolokia agents. Cross domain access can be easily restricted with Jolokia's security setup. The Javascript library already support CORS for most browsers out of the box, for IE8 and larger some special setup is still required. Transparent CORS client support for all browsers will be added to the Jolokia Javascript client in one of the next releases.

In addition the following new features were added:

• AMD support for jolokia.js and jolokia-simple.js
• Time based eviction of historical values remembered on the client side, in addition to count based eviction
• New configuration option httpServiceFilter for the OSGi agent for selection of a specific HttpService to bind to.
• None-caching headers added to the response

All thdeses changes plus the bug fixes are listed in the change log.

Starting with this release, bug tracking and release planning switches over to Jolokia's JIRA instance, kindly donated by the fine folks from Atlassian.

Also, there has been some (minor) progress with the new kid in the Chili garden, Ají, a Javascript single-page-application with an MBeanBrowser and a Dashboard. I'm still looking for helping hands, there is quite a lot to do here ;-)