EAServer 6.0 brings with it many new and exciting changes on a number of fronts, not the least of which is its management console, EAServer Manager. Many of the changes wrought in the console are simple byproducts of the changes in the underlying server, so I won't delve into them. Instead I'll deal with changes to the console itself, discussing the most notable ones and hopefully giving you a good feel for what's in store.

EAServer Manager Changes
By far the biggest and most obvious change is that EAServer Manager is no longer hosted in Sybase Central but in a Web-based framework. So rather than starting Sybase Central (installing it first if it isn't already on the client machine), the console can be accessed via a browser, typically at http://machine-name:8000/console. Once logged in (remember to use admin@system instead of jagadmin by default), you'll see the hierarchical treeview of the server's contents in the left pane and details in the right pane (see Figure 1), just as in earlier releases. The treeview acts the same way, you expand and collapse nodes by clicking on the + and - signs and you bring up the context menu by right-clicking on the node (or by using the Actions menu if you prefer, or have JavaScript disabled).

While EAServer 6.0's EAServer Manager behaves pretty much the way it behaved in previous releases, one significant change is that property sheets now appear in the details pane rather than in a separate dialog (see Figure 2 ). This means that when you select an entity in the treeview, the details pane will have that entity's property sheet, instead of a list of its children. The property sheet itself behaves as you'd expect, although rather than OK and Cancel buttons it has Apply and Reset buttons and pressing either of those buttons doesn't dismiss the property sheet.

One of the nice new features in the console is the new nodes that appear as children of each server nodes, the Statistic nodes. The main Statistics node gives you a concise, readable view of key statistics for that server, including statistics for HTTP, IIOP, servlet method invocations, scheduled tasks, and threads. There are also CPU and Components statistics node, both of which let you see a running graph of the load on the server.

The Web-based framework that EAServer Manager is now hosted in, the Sybase Management Console, also supports plug-ins the way Sybase Central does. For EAServer 6.0, the console includes three plug-ins, EAServer Manager, the Sybase Web Services Toolkit plug-in, and the Web Services Registries plug-in. The Sybase Web Services Toolkit lets the user browse through and manage the Web Services exposed by the EAServer servers, browse through the list of components, EJBs, for example, that could be exposed as Web Services, and also provides the facility to expose those components as Web Services. The Web Services Registries plug-in provides the user with a way of connecting to, browsing through, publishing to, and managing the contents of a variety of UDDI registries.

A nice side effect of using a Web-based solution is that it lets us take advantage of hyperlinks. Where in previous releases Web applications didn't show up under the Web Applications folder, this means that now they can, with the Web application hyperlinked to its parent and the parent hyperlinked to the Web app. This should make things easier to both conceptualize and navigate through.

Web Manager Rationale
At this juncture, I'd like to delve into the reason for the decision to host the console in a Web-based framework, since it's a fairly radical departure. In previous releases of EAServer, EAServer Manager was hosted in a Sybase Central framework. In EAServer 5.x, new management functionality started appearing in a Web-based management console, such as the Web Services tooling and UDDI browser. In EAServer 6.0, the management GUI is now entirely hosted in a Web-based management console. The first thing to point out is that this isn't intended, in any way, as a slight against Sybase Central. Speaking from an insider's perspective, I've found the Java-based Sybase Central to be well designed and written, efficient, and configurable. That said, it's a proprietary framework challenged in integrating with other management solutions like Eclipse or Web-based environments. Since we were, at least in some ways, starting from scratch from a management API and GUI perspective, we were able to evaluate the choices on completely equal footing, and decided to start with a Web-based solution. The merits of using a Web-based solution are that it enables the user to manage EAServer with no client-side installation, meaning that it can be managed from virtually anywhere, that it would be the easiest framework for our users to integrate into their own solutions, and that we could unify our management GUI into a single framework. We went out of our way to make the user-driven interactions similar to Sybase Central so that users already familiar with EAServer Manager would face a minimal learning curve.

Internal Implementation
I'd like to take a brief moment to peek under the covers so to speak and touch on how the console is implemented. For any management console provider, there's a real challenge in having to choose a GUI framework to present the console in. No matter what you choose, you're bound to disappoint someone. In an ideal world, the console would be presented in a number of GUI frameworks, letting the user choose their favorite one. Due to the duplicated effort, however, this would mean less time spent adding features and addressing problems. If, however, the GUI's business logic could be abstracted out and pulled into the management API layer and the GUI could be automatically generated from the management API then support for each GUI framework would be relatively little work (see Figure 3 and Figure 4 ). Thus when the management API layer is enhanced, those enhancements would be propagated to all supported GUI frameworks simultaneously. The biggest trick is providing enough metadata at the management API layer that the GUI doesn't look like a random collection of objects, properties, and methods, and can be presented coherently. This is exactly the approach that EAServer 6.0 has taken internally. So while this is of no particular importance to EAServer 6.0 users right away, it does mean that as a team we will need to spend far less time writing GUIs to support otherwise trivial changes and can now spend more time writing new features and, hopefully, supporting additional GUI frameworks.

Console Customization
One of the overriding principles of the console is that it's designed to be highly customizable. While a lot of thought went into establishing the default settings, we recognized that not every user has the same tastes, so we present a number of ways in which the console can be configured to your liking.

By choosing the Preferences node, you can configure a number of console-wide settings. The first of these is where you want the Apply, Reset, and Help buttons to appear, be it at the top left, top right, bottom left (immediately below the last control, on the left-hand side), bottom right (immediately below the last control, on the right-hand side), far bottom left (at the bottom left-hand side of the page) or far bottom right (at the bottom right-hand side of the page). Traditional property sheets have those buttons positioned at the far bottom right, but you may find that you prefer having them in a different location, depending on your screen resolution, the applications you commonly use, personal preference and other factors. You can also choose whether you want to see property descriptions appear, where available, to the right of the properties themselves. These descriptions are only intended to be concise explanations (e.g. "If this is selected, JMS store and forward processing will be initially suspended at server start-up time."). They shouldn't be construed as a replacement for the online help, which will contain more information. You can choose what color scheme to use, blue, Sybase Central or beige. If there's sufficient demand in future releases (or if an adept user figures out how the colourSchemes section of deploy/webapps/console.console/WEB-INF/database.xml works - not that I'd recommend it, of course, I'm just idly mentioning it), additional color schemes may be added.

You can choose to have wizards in a different window rather than in the right-hand pane. You can choose to have category nodes appear as tabs in the property sheet besides appearing in the treeview (e.g., EJB Components would then appear as tabs on the property sheet of an EJB module and Web Components would then appear as tabs on the property sheet of a Web application). There are more configuration options as well. Feel free to explore them and make the console work the way you want it to. The intention is to let you choose how the console looks and behaves so that you can feel comfortable using it.

Conclusion
Overall, EAServer 6.0's management console, like the server itself, represents a bold change from earlier releases, but the day-to-day interactions remain basically the same, so there's no big learning curve to fear. The new framework will behave almost identically, but with increased flexibility. With the added new features , and increased ease in adding more in the future, EAServer will continue to be easier to manage.