Question

I am new to jboss and would like to know what are the differences between ServiceMBean and load-on-startup servlet tag in web.xml? Also, I would like to know which one will always get loaded first or they are loaded at the same time? In what situation, I should use MBean and when I should use startup servlet or it doesn’t matter?

I need to write a a class/servlet to validate if all the required system properties (e.g -DINSTALL_DIR=blah ) is set. If not, then stop right there. else proceed and start the application.

Thanks in advance

-A

Answer 1

ServiceMBean is JMX, it is part of your JVM. load-on-startup servlet tag in web.xml is part of your J2EE application.

JMX is part of J2SE starting from JDK 1.5. So, you can have one ServiceMBean per JVM. not per application. JMX is used mostely for monitoring and managing the JVM. It provides access to information such as: number of classes loaded and threads running, memory consumption, garbage collection statistics, on-demand deadlock detection, and others. Another common use, is to refresh your cache.

JMX will allow you to instrument your application and control/monitor it using what-ever management console that your JMX container supports. An example would be a web application that implements a reference data cache…

A problem we had before was we would occasionally need to refresh the cache because a customer name changed in the database. If we had a refresh method on the MBean interface then we should be able to trigger this event using the JMX console. The JMX console may be a web or fat client that comes with our J2EE server. Our J2EE server may also support SNMP. This means that we may be able to invoke the method from a standard Tivoli or UniCenter console.
http://www.theserverside.com/news/1364664/J2EE-Application-Management-The-Power-of-JMX

You don’t need remote access to ServiceMBean in order to trigger some asynchrious action. Moreover, you need validation on scope of application, not the whole JVM (while, you can, theoretically, handle this issue in the ServiceMBean). So, it is more naturally, to do it as load-on-startup servlet tag in web.xml. In this way, in every start up of your application validation will happen.

One more clarification: ServiceMBean is JBoss-way to write JMX. All MBeans are server wide (not application wide). That’s why I use MBean and ServiceMBean freely above.