The MBean client API is kind of a pain in the neck. Talking RMI to contact MBean servers on multiple machines is a really big pain in the neck.
If you were sitting down to create a webapp to visualize some management data, you would perhaps rather write that code in terms of a JSON-ish data model of the data. than in terms of the MBean API. So, our thought was to solve both problems: get rid of the RMI business by having a service on each machine that exposed the data via JAX-RS, and be able to code to a less annoying data model. One of my colleagues is likely to post some more specific thoughts about what he hates about the MBean API.
