As outlined in the previous sections, the primary strength of JDMK is its capability of realizing flexible and highly distributed management systems. Agents developed with JDMK can be enhanced and modified at runtime, thus yielding the opportunity of delegating management tasks to them via the push model. Furthermore, these agents can also initiate the download of management functionality by themselves (pull model). These additional services are only transferred to the agent if needed. Under regular conditions, particular tasks of the management system may be carried out by the agent, thus preventing the exchange of large amounts of data between the managing system and the agent. The services provided by JDMK enable distribution and update mechanisms to enhance agents with additional functionality residing in centralized code repositories. JDMK also provides mechanisms for the persistent storage of M-Beans, thus enabling the agent components to remain close to the resource and eliminating the need of downloading them from remote servers. Simple web-based user interfaces can be generated automatically by using the HTML-Adaptor. JDMK-administered resources can be easily accessed from systems in other management architectures because several adaptors for different management protocols are provided. It is thus possible to administer JDMK-based agents from SNMP management platforms through the SNMP adaptor. The toolkit also enables the development of adaptors for new protocols not yet supported. The adaptor concept is helpful if agents should support multiple management protocols simultaneously e.g., information provided by a specific agent should be accessible not only from an SNMP-based management platform but also from a web browser via HTTP.
In summary, we believe that JDMK has a strong potential for the rapid development of highly distributed management environments and providing several protocol adaptors is a good basis for today's heterogeneous management environments.