I worked many years at BEA mostly developing tools and applications that ease the management and administration of WebLogic Server. May be that is the reason why I get very excited when I come across something that is geared towards making developers & admin’s life easier. In that context I should mention Geronimo Administration console. I have been using Geronimo 1.1 for a while to build a few simple applications usually WebApps, mostly non-critical and deparmental. (No, I haven’t abandoned WebLogic .. 
. Geronimo Administrative console is very simple with sufficient functionality to get going. There are a couple of things that I really liked in 1.1.
- DB Manager – This portlet lets developers create, update and query the embedded database (Derby) that is shipped with geronimo. I usually use this database to store some application related information. This is very convenient to quickly check the data in the database and also allows me to write sql’s and execute them on the database, which is sweet.
- Key Stores -This portlet will let you create and manage key stores. This wizard lets you configure SSL for your server in seconds allowing you to create a key store and add your CA certs to it.
Now Geronimo 2.0.1 has been released recently and I was pleasantly surprised to see more goodies that are worth mentioning. These I believe are very helpful to Administrators and developers alike.
- JMX Viewer – A very nice tree like representation of all the different types of MBeans that are registered in the server. Each MBean is represented as a tree node that shows its attribute names, values and operations that it supports. It will also let you invoke the operations and also let you perform a simple JMX search. All MBeans are grouped by its domain. I know there are a bunch of 3rd party applications out there which provide this functionality, but coming out of the box and well integrated with the console is a different experience altogether. A screen shot is shown below.
- ClassLoader Viewer – If you are looking for a class and wondering where it came from? The class loader viewer lets you find them. I see this being very useful when it comes to ClassCastException’s and ClassNotFoundException’s. You can also perform a simple search in the portlet to find the Class you are looking for, neat!
- Dependency Viewer – You might have applications that have dependencies on external libraries in the form of JAR or compressed archive files. Also every module running on the server typically references libraries or other modules. The Dependency Viewer displays a dependency view of all modules installed and running on the server. This information is very helpful in finding and resolving duplicate dependencies, and finding any missing dependencies.
- LDAP Viewer – The LDAP Viewer helps you connect to any LDAP server and browse its contents (for read only access). I believe I do not have to mention how useful this is.
These viewer’s are so useful that I almost wish WebLogic console has all of these.. . Here’s a better idea, may be you can write one of these and donate as a console extension to the console extensions code share project. Any One?
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