It would be useful for a management client to be able to send a single request containing a number of MBean operations and get back a single reply with the results of those operations.  This is particularly advantageous when the client is remote and perhaps using a slow transport.  For example, a client like the jconsole application bundled with Tiger samples attributes from a number of MBeans at every sample period.  Currently, it needs to do one RMI roundtrip for each MBean that it is getting attributes from.  It would be better if it could send a single request for all the attributes in one go.

One way to address this would be to define an "operation service".  This would be an MBean with an operation taking an array of Request objects, where each object encapsulates an MBean request such as getAttribute(objectName, attributeName) or invoke(objectName, operation, params, signature).  It would return an array of Reply objects with the result of each operation, including an indication of whether the object succeeded or returned an exception.  A boolean parameter could specify whether the set of operations should be stopped as soon as any of them gets an exception, or whether all should be run regardless.

If transactional semantics are implemented, as suggested by RFE 5106222, then there should be a tie-in to this service.