How Jolokia works in Server Side?

Question

Jolokia is an HTTP/JSON bridge for remote JMX access. It is an alternative to standard JSR 160 connectors, using an agent based approach.For more info [http://www.jolokia.org/features-nb.html] Really been impressed with this tool to read JMX mbeans Remotely with HTTP and we are able to read multiple mbean attributes in a single remote request.

Just curious to know the server side working of Jolokia,

1. What protocol or how does it reads Server side JMX MBeans and send to Client?
2. Does this internally use JMX to read in Server Side and send to Client?
3. Or another other specialized way in JVM to read all MBeans of the JVM ?

Answer 1

Jolokia is a an agent which needs to be installed within the JVM on which the JMX information will be read. So on the server side, it speaks locally to JMX (via the local Java API in javax.management) which gets exposed via JSON and HTTP in a custom protocol. So it's quite simple.

One of the strengths of the Jolokia agent, which come in 4 flavors is that it can be used in nearly any setup, might it be a full Java EE Server, an Java ESB, another middleware server or any Java process in general.

Please have a look at the reference manual which gives a more detailed overview of Jolokia's architecture.