Java Management Extensions (JMX) is an API that facilitates building
management applications that can configure, and perform operations on, a
server application. In general, each manageable component of the server
application is represented by a Management Bean (or MBean, for
short). JMX defines three types of MBeans, of which Model MBeans
are the most flexible. Model MBeans provide a way to define MBeans for
many different components, without having to write a specific MBean
implementation class for each one.
However, this power comes at a price. It is necessary to set up a
substantial amount of metadata about each MBean, including the attributes
it should expose (similar to JavaBeans properties), the operations it should
make available (similar to calling methods of a Java object via reflection),
and other related information. The Modeler component is designed to
make this process fairly painless -- the required metadata is configured from
an XML description of each Model MBean to be supported. In addition,
Modeler provides a factory mechanism to create the actual Model MBean instances
themselves.
For further information, see the package description in the
JavaDocs for the Modeler package.
