admin_client.jar versus admin.jar

A pretty good question was asked recently on the OTN forum for OC4J about the two outwardly similar command line utilities we have in OC4J/OracleAS 10.1.3.x.

I thought I'd post the question and answer here in case anyone else was wondering about this.

Question:

OC4J provide two command-line utility: admin.jar and admin_client.jar for performing configuration tasks on OC4J.

admin_client.jar can work in Oracle Application Server clustered environment as well as on a standalone OC4J server, but admin.jar only works in a standalone OC4J installation.

Do they have any other difference?

If used in a standalone OC4J installation, are they the same?

Answer:

In a nutshell the situation is this:

admin.jar is the old command line utility we kept in the release for backwards compatibility. It uses a set of internal/proprietrary APIs to work against OC4J. It works only against OC4J standalone and does not allow you to perform any of its operations against an OracleAS instance.

admin_client.jar is a new command line utility added in 10.1.3.x that is based on JMX and its associated set of specifications to manage and deploy to a J2EE container. It can connect to and manage all variants of OC4J -- standalone, single AS instance, clustered AS instance. It has many more resource configuration options added to it.

For simplicity, we maintained the "feel" of admin.jar so the command structure is very similar to what was provided in admin.jar, but the way it works is completely different under the covers.

While admin.jar still works and is supported, you should use admin_client.jar whenever you want to do command line operations with 10.1.3.x. I was considering putting a note to that effect on stdout whenever admin.jar was used, but we didn't end up doing it.

Another two nice aspects about admin_client.jar are

1. The common library it uses to perform its operations is also used by the Oracle Ant tasks -- so in effect there are two faces to it -- admin_client.jar and Ant tasks. There's a near 100% compatibility between the two meaning what you can do with admin_client.jar you can most likely do with a set of Ant tasks from a development environment.

2. We have isolated the dependencies for admin_client.jar and produced a separate, small distribution called oc4j_admin_client.zip (which is 6MB from memory) that can be unzipped onto any remote server and you have the full admin_client.jar utility -- meaning that to perform administration options against ant of the OC4J variants (standalone, single and clustered AS instance) you only need this one, very small distribution.

The documentation on the OC4J management tools covers this to some degree:
http://download-west.oracle.com/docs/cd/B32110_01/web.1013/b28950/admin.htm#CEGHHGGB