As you might know, Jmx4Perl is the mother of Jolokia. But what might be not so known is, that Jmx4Perl provides a set of nice CLI tools for accessing Jolokia agents. However, installing Jmx4Perl manually is cumbersome because of its many Perl and also native dependencies.
However, if you are a Docker user there is now a super easy way to benefit from this gems.
Ok, you know Docker. And since you are a Java developer you want to know how you can use this in your daily development workflow. You probably also heard about the docker-maven-plugin which seamlessly creates Docker images, starts and stops Docker containers and more all with a concise configuration syntax.
And now there is this new goal docker:watch.
The HTTP-JMX Bridge Jolokia allows easy access to JMX. It exposes all JMX information and operations via an REST-like interface and has tons of nifty features. Jmx4Perl on the other side is a client for Jolokia, which beside Perl access modules also provides quite some nice CLI tools for accessing and installing Jolokia. This post explains how install these tools on OS X.
A health check is a useful technique for determining the overall operational state of a system in a consolidated form. It provides some kind of internal monitoring which collects metrics, evaluates them against some thresholds and provides a unified result. Health checks are now coming to Jolokia. This post explains the strategy to include health checks into Jolokia without blowing up the agents to much.
A local Maven repository serves as a cache for artifacts and dependencies, we all know this. This helps in speeding up things but can cause subtle problems when doing releases. Docker can help here a bit for avoiding caching issues.
My docker-maven-plugin is undergoing a major refactoring. This post explains the motivation behind this and also what you can expect in the very near future. The configuration syntax becomes much cleaner and implicit behavior was removed.
While on the way of transforming the Jolokia integration test suite from a tedious, manual, half-a-day procedure to a full automated process I ran into and felt in love with Docker. As a byproduct a java-jolokia docker repository emerged, which can be easily used as a Java base image for enabling a Jolokia JVM agent during startup for any Java application.
NSEnter is a nice way to connect to a running Docker container. This post presents a script to simplify the usage of nsenter together with Boot2Docker.
Recently I gave a Meetup talk for the Docker Munich Meetup Group which explained how Docker can help developers to improve integration tests and to ship applications.
