James, you always ask the hardest questions :)
On Mar 17, 2006, at 1:00 AM, James Strachan wrote:
I fell for the charms of XBean a long time ago; both ActiveMQ and
ServiceMix have been using it as its primary configuration
mechanism for some time. I recently XBean-ified Jetty too which
took about an hour and can currently configure most of Jetty.
Incidentally there's currently a real simple file system based
deployer that can walk the file system building up classpath trees
and booting up any XBean or Spring applications it finds. e.g. the
following test repository boots up ActiveMQ fully configured via
XBean. (This deployer could use some work to be able to deal with
service and classpath dependencies, to allow graphs rather than
just trees to be used)
http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/geronimo/xbean/trunk/xbean-server/
src/test/repository/
The GBean integration of ActiveMQ has always been pretty simple and
limited; I"ve always wanted full rich integration where every
single transport connector, network connector, journal
configuration, thread pool, queue, topic, connection & subscription
are all richly available to the GBean kernel & management subsystem
etc. We kinda have that today with a combination of XBean and JMX;
but it doesn't really integrate yet with the GBean kernel.
So I'm wondering if we can put together some kind of GBean facade
to XBean; so the current kernel sees the XBean world as just a
bunch of GBeans and anything which can deploy in XBean (which
includes pretty much every Spring application on the planet)
suddenly becomes available nicely into the GBean world.
The short answer is not without a lot of work and re-architecting of
the Geronimo kernel. My rough plan is to not do a full XBean
integration until Geronimo 2.0, but in the 1.x tree I would like to
continue to simplify and add more features from xbean. Specifically,
I would like to integrate the xbean-reflect package for building
attributes into Geronimo. This will allow us to build arbitrarily
complex attribute values which can contain references to other
GBeans. I have already added an optional flag to turn of proxing of
references between GBeans and hope to have that always on in Geronimo
1.2. I doubt we will be able to add xbean-spring to Geronimo until 2.0.
Something like a GBean which boots up the XBean kernel and exposes
all the registered services as GBeans would do the trick. It
shouldn't be too hard right?
Unfortunately, it just isn't the way Geronimo works.
A second question is; what to do about JMX. In ActiveMQ we've
written a bunch of MBeans so whether you use ActiveMQ in J2SE or
J2EE you can point JConsole at the JVM and see all the various
stats, queue depths, buffer sizes and so forth. Some of these
things are created at deployment time; though most of them come and
go as clients connect to the broker and the brokers own runtime
state changes e.g. deach connection & subscription has an MBean;
clients can create new destinations at runtime etc. How would it be
best to integrate those into the GBean infrastructure - or would it
be best to just leave them in JMX and let the management portlets
just use JMX to access them.
I'm not sure on this one.
-dain
