We are making a whole scale move from Microsoft land to the
Java world. We have a rather complex distributed architecture that uses many Window NT based services spread across many machines.
To solve this problem in NT (C++ and VB), we had a central control NT service whose job was to find the service you needed and gave you a COM interface, make sure it was running, monitored its lifecycle, cached objects, etc.
Now that we are moving to Java, we need something equivalent. Obviously, we lose the nice service model in NT, as we are to be platform independent. We will have
EJB's, Java apps, JMS queues, etc spread across the network that need to be managed and controlled by some central object.
So the big question: Is there a Java API, framework, 3rd party pkg, etc. that might have the capabilities or the classes we can use to gain this, or at least a headstart?