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Java Management Extensions or JMX 1.0 API was introduced as part of JSR 003 of the Java Community Processes. The idea was to address long standing demand of Java developers for tools for monitoring and managing applications, system objects and network devices. JMX is not a very well understood technology, but it is indeed very powerful. I had my first real exposure to JMX while I was still an intern as part of Google’s Summer of Code project. My project was to add management and monitoring extensions to Apache Derby. During the 3 months phase, I added some very basic code to Derby which was later reworked and continued by Sun.

However, at that time, writing JMX code was not only painful but complex and there were not many frameworks around. I eventually wrote a tool called EasyMBean which simplified creation of MBeans. Instead of writing code or including large jars (apache or spring) , EasyMbean lets you use very simple annotations to mark your MBean code. The code was initially written for JManage, but was eventually released to public. It can be downloaded here from SourceForge and documentation can be accessed here. The tool was also featured on Java World’s blog. The article can be accessed here.

Sun has eventually decided to incorporate annotations in JMX 2.0 API and the this post from Eamonn McManu’s blog (JMX Spec lead) describes how to get them from Java 7.0 community page. There is also a Java World post describing the same.