JMX, SNMP, Java, etc...

Quoting from the article:

Built by college students in their spare time, this Java-powered Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) dazzled the judges at a prestigious international competition—and did Sun Labs proud.

If you read the article in details, you'll find out that the amazing little submarine is also a using the Java(TM) Management Extensions - that is, JMX. I was curious about this and went to S.O.N.I.A web site - to check whether there was more information about how the vehicle is using JMX. After all it's not every day that you can see such a flashy application of the technology you've been working on.

As it happens, I was writing a few days ago about the history of JMX and arguing that making things Easy Is Not Always Simple, and more particularly stressing the fact that:

[...] the developer who writes managed objects should not have to be bothered with the complex details of the management protocol that's going to export them. [...] the goal of JMX was to make the implementation of management interfaces easy: as easy as designing and implementing a plain old Java Object. In that respect, I believe that JMX did not miss its goal.

Browsing through the S.O.N.I.A web site, I found the following interesting quote:

Telemetry

For debugging and configuration purposes, a telemetric interface was designed. Such a tool enables the operator to configure every single aspect of AUV4 on-the-fly. For communication between the two modules, we use Java Management Extensions (JMX). This Java technology provides an API for managing and monitoring remote applications using a transparent network Remote Procedure Call (RPC) scheme. This enabled us to concentrate on user interface instead of communication protocols.

Well done guys! This looks like a really cool project and an amazing achievement!

Cheers,
-- daniel

BTW: The S.O.N.I.A website is also in French! Makes me ashamed of blogging in English only...