Java Desktop Application Requirement – Is sockets the preferred choice

I'm not super familiar with Zenoss but when I used to used nagios for this sort of thing we'd make the c/c++ process listen on a socket and write a custom nagios plugin which would hand over diagnostic and status information.

First step is to choose the lib you want to use to make your process listen.. Something like C++ Socket Library will do for that. Nothing complicated there.. just make the process listen.

Then you have to define the response your process will send given a particular stimulus. This really meant (at least with nagios) defining the 'service' and then sending the process the signal that corresponded to that service. The simplest thing you can do is create a 'process ping' just see if you can successfully connect to the running process. If you do than the custom nagios plugin knows at least the process is still alive.

There's much more sophisticated stuff you can do but the idea is simple enough. You can write your own little lib of process listening code encapsulated within objects and pull it into your custom c++ stuff in a standardized manner whenever you build one (or all) your executables

My understanding is Zenoss can do this too.

Probably since Zenoss is python then you'll write your custom plugin for it using something like Twisted for connecting to your listening c++ executable.

Let me give you an example: Say you want to communicate/chat with your friend, who lives not at your address. For that to happen, you have to establish a "communication channel". Say, you want to do this communication using telephones. You know that there is a network of telephone lines in the city that is extended to every house.

Now, there is a telephone socket in your house, and one in your friends house. For the communication to take place, you and your friend have to connect to the network by plugging your phone to the socket, at the both end of the communication. Sockets in programming is the same, conceptually, as the telephone sockets.

In programming, you have two processes (running programs) that want to communicate with each other. For that, they have to establish a communication link between themselves. Again, there is a network available, they just need to connect to this network using some sort of sockets. Unix sockets are one such socket that provides this connectivity/pluggability to the network. So, in each of the two programs, you will have some piece of code that does the job of connecting to the network through sockets.

The rest are details.