Without knowing too much about JMX, I've always assumed that it would be the best approach for building in remote management to our standalone Java server application. Our server application has some minimal remote control capability, using text commands sent via TCP/IP socket to it.

Using the home grown approach, it is fairly to add a new command. (Just create new command text, and the code to handle that in the message receiver). On the other hand, we have hardly implemented any commands, even though there are many things we would like to be able to execute remotely.

I am trying to weigh the value of moving to incorporating JMX (learning it, and building the interfaces), versus just sticking with the home-grown approach. Does anyone have any experience or advice regarding changing an existing application to use JMX?