Question

I want to provide a telnet interface to my Java application, primarily so that developers can interact with the app, view debugging information, etc – before we’ve implemented our full end-user facing GUI.

Can anyone recommend an easy and effective way to do this? I’ve looked at embedding the scala interpreter, but it doesn’t seem to be accessible via telnet. Ditto for Beanshell (which I’m not too keen on anyway as I believe its unmaintained).

Answer 1

Couple of options:

• Grizzly for embedding a generic server (http://grizzly.java.net/)
• Mina is another similar option (http://mina.apache.org/)

Instead of Telnet, it might be easier to just embed a web server. Not that a CLI isn’t cool and all, but it might be a bit easier/more friendly.

• Jetty http://docs.codehaus.org/display/JETTY/Embedding+Jetty
• Tomcat http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-5.5-doc/catalina/docs/api/org/apache/catalina/startup/Embedded.html

JMX is great for monitoring but the UI isn’t very good for ‘writing’ data. NetBeans has some nice tutorial projects in it.

I think of all of the options above the embedded Jetty is probably the easiest.