The JBoss Extensible Server

JBoss is an extensible, reflective, and dynamically reconfigurable Java application server. It includes a set of components that implement the J2EE specification, but its scope goes well beyond J2EE. JBoss is open-ended middleware, in the sense that users can extend middleware services by dynamically deploying new components into a running server. We believe that no other application server currently offers such a degree of extensibility. This paper focuses on two major architectural parts of JBoss: its middleware component model, based on the JMX model, and its meta-level architecture for generalized EJBs. The former requires a novel class loading model, which JBoss implements. The latter includes a powerful and flexible remote method invocation model, based on dynamic proxies, and relies on systematic usage of interceptors as aspect-oriented programming artifacts.

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