Jolokia 0.95 is here

The summer break is over and Jolokia is one step closer to 1.0. Germans might reasonably argue, ’ehm, what summer do you talk about ?’ but at least 0.95 is now a fact and introduces two new features. Very cool features, IMO.

The Jolokia JDK6 JVM Agent is now able to use the Java Attach API so that it is possible to dynamically attach and detach a Jolokia agent to a running Java process, much like jconsole. It is a really exciting and powerful feature, because it allows for HTTP/JSON access without (permanently) instrumenting a Java process by deploying an agent or modifying startup options, which is a major obstacle for quite some users. The nice advantage over jconsole is that it attaches locally but export the data remotely. Perfect for headless server installations.

The second addition is the support for upstream serialization of all OpenType types so that JMX operations and write requests can be used with OpenTypes, too. For MXBeans special support has been added, so that e.g. a JSON map gets properly translated to an MXBean’s Map attribute (which in between gets translated to a TabularData with a fixed format). Since MXBeans are so easy to declare, implement and to register, this missing piece really adds to our JMX on Capsaicin mantra.

Both features arrived via GitHub pull requests and are proofs for the relevance of the social coding model introduced by GitHub. Big acknowlegdments go out to Assaf Berg and Greg Bowyer for providing patches which lead to these features.

This is probably the last release before 1.0, which is to be expected before the end of September.