/events as SNMP traps that can read by the agent. There are many protocols that can be used for interaction between the manage- ment application and the network element. The SNMP, as the name signifies, is easier to implement and maintain and has been the most preferred network man- agement protocol. With new requirements to support XML (extensible markup language) based data, which can be intercepted and parsed by any third-party appli- cation with sufficient authentication, XML agents based on XML protocols like XMLP (XML protocol) and SOAP (simple object access protocol) are becoming popular. SOAP is very effective for web-based network management. The TL1 is another protocol that is popular to provide command line based network manage- ment interface. For file transfers there is no better protocol than FTP (file transfer protocol). So the protocol agent available at the NMS data collection component is mainly dependent on the type of application for which the NMS will be put to use. Most of the popular NMS products have support for multiple protocols. Some of the open source SNMP agents are WestHawk SNMP agent, NetSNMPJ, and IBM SNMP Bean Suite. Similarly a popular open source FTP agent is edtFTPJ. Most of these open source products are built in Java programming language and can be downloaded from sourceforge.net 11.5 Platform Components The platform components are the functional components and libraries that are used by the other components that make up the NMS. All items that are reused and form the basic blocks for building other components are aggregated under platform components (see Figure 11.3). Some of the common functionality that is required in any communication application like logging of events and encryption of data can be taken as example applications that fall under platform components. Platform components Logging Security/encryption services services Object persistence services Figure 11.3 Blocks in platform components. What Is NMS? To have a better understanding of platform components, let us