How Admin CLI Could be Extended

Requirement

See the e-mail thread on admin@glassfish.java.net for details. The Open ESB team requested for this feature for consideration before V3. Basic requirements are:

1. It should be possible to layer commands on top of GlassFish V2.next installation. It is acceptable if a config file (e.g. asadminenv.conf) is to be modified for V2.next so that asadmin understand where additional commands could be found.
2. This should be delivered into a release immediately after V2 (this release is called V2.next hereafter).

Approach to Extension

The approach is such that a layer sitting atop GlassFish V2.next (base product) should be able to leverage the command line parsing, environment variable handling, displaying command help and synopsis capabilities of the so-called CLI Framework. The asadmin program should be able to find and invoke the commands whose code might be available in a jar file other than admin-cli.jar. All the commands that asadmin invokes for GlassFish V2.next reside in this jar file.

Tasks Involved

Following tasks need to be done:

1. Making CLIDescriptor Public
2. Making CLI Framework Public
3. Specifying the CLI Interface Extension Points
4. Specifying Locations for Searching Commands
5. Algorithm to Disambiguate Commands
6. Displaying Command Help
7. Adding a Capability to Dump All Commands and their Synopsis