Q:

JMX "Dashboard" App

I have been playing around with JMX for the last few days and although I don't mind JConsole or the standard JMX web admin tool, it would be nice to create my own web app that somehow queried the registered JMX MBeans and presented a nice, rich-UI-style "dashboard" with charts and graphs; things that the JMX console or JConsole simply do not have. 
Is this possible?  I've heard of something called a JMX "agent" but not sure if that has anything to do with how JMX can be queried and managed by a dashboard-style app.  Thanks in advance! 

A:

Jolokia is an agent based approach to JMX which translates JMX native calls to JSON-over-HTTP.  It comes with a Javascript library which is perfectly suited for used within the browser.  For a sample usage within a web page look at the demo of the Jolokia-Cubism Integration or even better have a look at the blog post from Tomasz Nurkiewicz which gives a very nice example of using Jolokia along with the Highcharts graphing library. 
Said all this, there is even more: Ají, Jolokia's fancy sister, has been started as project which will provide an JMX console bundled along with Jolokia clients.  I'm still sorting things outs (well, it moves slowly ...), but I think that over the summer more will be there.  One can already play around with it and we still look for volunteers (hint ;-) ....

A:

What you are looking to do has probably already been built unless you really want to do it yourself.  Have you looked at VisualVM before?  I really like it http://visualvm.java.net/mbeans_tab.html/
To write your own application that manages MBeans remotely I think you could start with this tutorial.  Seems to be a good starting point.  
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/jmx/remote/custom.html

