[jbosstools-dev] Short, medium, and long term changes to JMX component

Hi All: For those who may not be aware, the JMX component is set to undergo significant changes in the future. The cause for these changes are a large amount of duplication between FuseIDE and the current JMX component, which need to be unified together. Based on the current release schedule, it is unlikely we get a complete refactor / merge accomplished in any way for this year's release, though we are proceeding at this time with the expectation that we get as much low-hanging fruit dealt with as quickly as possible. With this in mind, Paul Leacu has been working on investigating the history of the various branches and the origins and lifecycles of them over the past 7 years, with some assistance from myself and Lars Heinemann. The low-hanging fruit we've decided to make a baseline goal for this year's major release is to move the JVM monitor code from FuseIDE into the jbosstools-server/jmx repository, and to get it enabled in our JMX view. FuseIDE, which has a release schedule that is staggered from ours, will have plenty of time to adapt to these changes, remove the outdated duplicates from their repository, and begin using our JMX component as a dependency for FuseIDE. At this point, we've accomplished two main goals: 1) We've verified that there are no critical incompatibilities or blockages that would prevent the larger merge in principle 2) We have successfully made a topic branch which moves the jvm monitor's core and ui plugins into the jbosstools-server repository. This is not enough for a commit to jbosstools-server's master branch yet. While the core and the ui have been added cleanly, it is not enabled in our JMX / MBean Explorer view. A critical wiring plugin still needs to be refactored in order to enable this. Once the remaining plugin, in charge of adding the JVM Monitor nodes to our MBean Explorer view, has been cleaned up, we will be looking to add this code to the upcoming release, and will be requesting feedback via a Pull Request. This approach would achieve the following goals: 1) Safely add new *and functional* code AND workflow, with no new dependencies, to the jbosstools-server repository 2) Remove duplication from the FuseIDE for a significant chunk of what needs to be merged 3) Serves as a baseline for further integration and a starting point for the larger refactor that is needed The work can be followed at the following links: Planning document: https://community.jboss.org/docs/DOC-52590?uniqueTitle=false JIRA issue: https://issues.jboss.org/browse/ECLIPSE-946 JIRA issue: https://issues.jboss.org/browse/JBIDE-14119 The new additions as they stand at the moment can be viewed here: https://github.com/jbosstools/jbosstools-server/pull/220 We are hopefully expecting this critical wiring component to be converted over the next week or so, with a few days after for testing. An alternative plan would be to accept PR 220 without "wiring" immediately. This would give us a lot of new code, but no new functionality for users, and so is of questionable utility, but I list it here as an option. This alternative plan would be safe, and would serve as a base for future integration, but would not in fact be very "useful" to the current JMX component. Feel free to discuss any questions or concerns on strategy here or on the JIRAs. - Rob Stryker