Administrative interfaces


jAugment started based on JINI (now it supports additional network-technologies as we are working on abstracting from the JINI-base) and in JINI all services, be they video-recorders or text-editors can be administred using a set of well-known interfaces. This allows to write administrative tools that are able to administer services they never knew about safely.
A service's proxy implements an interface Administratable that specifies exactly one function to return an administrative-object.
If this object is a GUI-component or UI-descriptor it can be displayed directly (if there is a screen). But the service-browser (in jAugment the user-interfaces are basically service-browsers) may also look at what interfaces the object implements and display it's own user-interface to use these interfaces. In jAugment both happens in the SwingUI.
The interfaces include functions for things like: stopping and re-starting a service, setting the place(here: file) where the service stores it's internal configuration, attach new attributes and modify existing ones,... .
They also allow to configure the groups a service belongs to. Services only see each other if they share at least one group (they are always members of the public-group).