The Web Services Connector for JMX Agents being defined by JSR 262 is available in Early Access.

I described the background to this JSR in an earlier blog entry. In short, it serves two purposes:

• Provide an alternative to the RMI connector for JMX-aware clients (such as JConsole). Because the JSR 262 connector uses SOAP over HTTP, it can reuse a web server configuration you have already established; for example it can reuse the authentication you have defined. It can also function better across firewalls.
• Interoperate with non-JMX-aware clients. Because the JSR 262 connector is based on the WS-Management standard, it can interoperate with other software that also respects that standard. For example, it can interoperate with WinRM, Microsoft's WS-Management implementation in Windows Vista.

This Early Access Release is part of a formal Early Draft Review in the Java Community Process. The draft specification is available for study and comment. Send any comments to jsr-262-comments@jcp.org. The formal review period ends on the 23rd of May, but feel free to send comments at any time. Of course the sooner you send comments, the more likely you will be able to influence the final specification.

An early version of the Reference Implementation (RI) is also available for download. We are very interested in your experiences with it. The best address to send questions and comments on the RI is users@ws-jmx-connector.dev.java.net. You'll need to join this list before you can send messages to it.

Jean-François Denise did most of the engineering work on the RI and also much of the specification. He will be talking about JSR 262 in our talk at JavaOne next Thursday, and demonstrating how it can interoperate with software not running on the Java platform, including Windows management software.

[Technorati: winrm, ws-management, jmx, javaone.]