How should I do interprocess communication between a management process and child processes?

Question

I have five separate java processes ; which are running as business logic modules. I would like to develop my process management application were i can start/ping/monitor/message child processes.

Also, it maybe sharing resources like cache etc with child processes over rest-ws or worst case rmi calls since requires additional overhead.

I was inclined toward webservice based api, which will keep sending information about business logic running within processes. The processes can be data churning, computation, notification process engines.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

One option is to use JMX, and publish one or more MBeans. Oracle has documentation on it . You can use the request information from the processes, or to send them signals to change their behavior.

The bare bones outline of what you would do is decide what methods you need to expose remotely in each of your child processes. Each of them should define an interface with those methods, then an implementation of that interface. Then those implementations need to be registered with the MBeanServer .

The advantage of this approach is that you will immediately get a bare-bones 'management application', because you can open JConsole against your processes and use the MBeans. If you then wish to create a separate application that will more cleanly present your data, you can do so at your leisure, without changing the child processes.

This approach does not really get you anyway to 'sharing a cache', but sharing a cache between processes (or machines) should really be a separate question (I think).