Any management solution based on Java would need to play nicely with existing frameworks and protocols, plugging in and cooperating rather than ignoring and replacing. The JCP is the formalization of the open process that SMI has been using since 1995 to develop and revise Java technology specifications in cooperation with the international Java community. The emergence of JMX from the JCP bodes well for its future. Both JMX agents and managers integrate services that give them autonomy and intelligence. These services enable agents to sometimes manage their own resources and let managers forward information back and forth between agents and management applications.
Agents are more autonomous because they can incorporate certain management tasks, such as polling.
The intelligence of agents is embodied in simple logic that can keep managers from escalating unimportant events. These two measures, autonomy and intelligence, can reduce network traffic and make management applications more robust. In the JMX architecture, both services and devices are treated as managed objects. The components, Mbeans, can be added and removed as needs evolve. This gives scalability to both agents and managers, certainly a critical feature for thin clients.