RHQ Server Plugins - Innovation Made Easy

RHQ is introducing a major new feature - server plugins. I know what you are saying... "ho-hum, another 'plugin mechanism'". It is true that this is analogous to the RHQ Agent plugin functionality - just as you can write your own agent plugins to extend the types of resources an agent can manage, you now have similar capabilities in the RHQ Server.

But when you examine the capabilities of this new server plugin subsystem, you will notice that you now have access to the full breadth and depth of functionality that the core RHQ Server code has, without having to modify core code. Using server plugins, you can plugin your own management code to the RHQ Server, allowing you to add to the existing core management feature set. With a minimum of a single Java POJO class bundled with an XML descriptor, you can now extend RHQ server functionality in areas you couldn't with the agent plugins. The ability to innovate new features and capabilities will be much easier.

I put together a demo for an illustration of the potential that server plugins open up. If you are interested, the demo's plugin code can be found here. This sample plugin has a single Java POJO and an XML plugin descriptor.

The core of the server plugin container infrastructure is checked in. More work will be done to enhance it further, but it works today. What the RHQ team is currently working on is adding support for different types of server plugins.

For example, the demo mentioned above uses a "generic plugin" - that is just one type of server plugin. This is a "catch-all" type of plugin - all other plugin types will essentially build on top of the same capabilities of a "generic plugin". This generic functionality allows for the server plugin developer to write Java code that gets embedded in the server and runs. Each plugin can define a plugin component (much like an agent resource component in an agent plugin). The plugin component is notified when lifecycle events occur (such as when the plugin is started and stopped). The generic plugin can also utilize the server's scheduler to run jobs on a periodic basis. For example, if I want to generate management reports, I can write a server plugin that has a job that runs every day, generating reports when it runs (in fact, this is what the demo above illustrates).

Other types of plugins that are actively being developed are:

• Content Plugins - these will allow you to define remote content repositories so you can pull in software from those remote locations to be pushed out to remote machines.


• Alert Plugins - these will allow you to plug in remote alert destinations. Heiko has some great ideas on this and has already demoed a few of them. The one I like in particular is the alert plugin that integrates with Mobicents so when an RHQ alert is triggered, a voice message is sent to an administrator's phone. Very cool :)


• Perspective Plugin - this is an extremely powerful type of plugin that will enable a developer to add additional graphical user interfaces to the core RHQ Server. There is a entire perspectives design, which will build within the server plugin infrastructure.
  

A lot more will be communicated about these server plugins as they are built out. But you can still do server plugin development today. Documentation is available, and we'll be building out more documentation as we get further along.