As part of the management work, there is a process where various classes are instrumented and then exported into a structured (hierarchal) repository. There are various sources for the metainfo about how an object should be presented in the management system. The first two sources of metainfo are (1) the introspection of the mgmt interfaces defined when the object is exported, and (2) xml files that are directly parsed for the metainfo.
We need to select the format for how the metainfo will be stored internally. I can think of three options 1) new classes written for this purpose 2) the java.beans classes plus a limited number of new classes 3) the model mbean classes plus a limited number of new classes i thought about it a lot, and believe that using the model mbean classes makes the most sense. there would also be a limited number of custom classes to represent the additional structure that managed classes inherit from being written for/deployed to phoenix. the only draw back i can see is that as the jmx spec evolves phoenix management would need to stay more or less in step. i think its worth the tradeoff. does anyone have any thoughts/preferences? assuming that's good, i did a search on google for jmx and xml and one of the first things i came across was the common's own modeler package. it includes utility classes for contructing model mbeans, and includes the code to generate them from xml. would it be expedient to adapt that to our purposes? if so, would it get copied to excalibur? i don't know phoenix stands wrt to the commons as they seem to overlap in some areas. i'll take what advice i'm given and run with it. - huw
