Table of Contents
The JBoss Microcontainer (MC) provides an environment to configure and manage POJOs (plain old java objects). It is designed to reproduce the existing JBoss JMX Microkernel but targetted at POJO environments. As such it can be used standalone outside the JBoss Application Server.
The 2.0.x release provides a set of features to support POJO deployment in JBossAS-5.0.x, JBossESB, and the bootstrap of services used by standalone projects like embedded EJB3.
This document takes you through the design of the microcontainer including design decisions and future directions.
The primary focus of the MC is as a framework for building server kernels. It replaces the legacy JMX based kernel found in JBossAS4.x and earlier with a POJO based kernel that has been generalized to better support extensibility along the primary aspects required for a server type of environment: aop, metadata, class loading, deployments, state management, lifecycle/dependcies, configuration, and management. The use of the term server should not be correlated with large memory/cpu requirment environments of typical application/web servers. A server in the context of the MC is just a kernel for plugging POJO container models into. The MC can be configured for extremely lightweight application type setups like a junit testcase as well as full feature application servers.