adam bien's blog

JBoss 5.1.0 GA comes with a visual administration console, which seems to be based on JSF 1.2 with RichFaces and Seam. You can reach the console under the following URL: http://localhost:8080/admin-console/. User name and password are both admin (unlike Glassfish, where the password is adminadmin :-)). JBoss 5.1.0 installation was very smooth: download, extract and start.

First impressions: 

1. The admin console looks nice and clean
2. The most important resources like JDBC / JMS / EJB 2 and 3 applications are accessible.
3. You can start and stop services applications and modules (ejb-jars) directly from the admin console
4. Basic metrics for application server, resources and applications are available:

   VM Free Memory	101.6MB	The amount of free memory for the JVM this app server instance is running on
   JVM Max Memory	490.7MB	The amount of max memory for the JVM this app server instance is running on
   JVM Total Memory	490.7MB	The amount of total memory for the JVM this app server instance is running on
   Total Transactions	0	Total number of transactions since last restart
   Transactions Committed	0	Number of transactions commited since last restart
   Transactions Rolledback	0	Number of transactions commited since last restart

5. The administration console is fast and responsive.
6. I tried, however, to create a new JMS destination via the console and got the following error (will have to investigate the cause):
    Failed to add Resource (see app server log for additional details): java.lang.RuntimeException:Failed to process template. -> java.lang.RuntimeException:java.io.FileNotFoundException: /Users/abien/work/servers/jboss-5.1.0.GA/server/default/deploy/jms/hugo-service.xml (No such file or directory) -> java.io.FileNotFoundException:/Users/abien/work/servers/jboss-5.1.0.GA/server/default/deploy/jms/hugo-service.xml (No such file or directory) 

1.  GF help system and documentation is really well integrated into the console.
2. With GF v2 you can easily manage your JVM settings.
3. Callflow (a tree-like monitoring preview) is useful for monitoring, the other metrics are also finer.
4. You can access and filter log files directly from the console.
5. Custom JMX-monitoring can be directly configured from the admin console.
6. You can setup a cluster directly from the console.
7. The synergy between the domain.xml (configuration file), the command line interface asadmin (could be considered as a configuration DSL) and the visual console is unique (I'm planning to demos some features at the CommunityOne West)
8. [...]