ARCHITECTURE OVERVIEW: Microkernels, Services and Aspects
The JBoss Application Server architecture can be divided into four primary layers:
Microkernel Layer
At its core is a microkernel-based server that is extremely small in footprint. By utilizing Java Management Extensions (JMX), the microkernel delivers a lightweight component model that offers hot deployment and advanced class-loading features and full lifecycle management.
Services Layer
On top of the microkernel resides a Services Oriented Architecture (SOA). It consists of a series of services, each of which are neatly packaged and fully hot-deployable. Services deployed in JBoss can range anywhere from transaction and messaging services to mail services to security services to a connection pool. You can easily add new services or remove unnecessary services from your deployments to reduce the overall footprint and improve performance. You can also build your own services and deploy them as SARs within JBoss Application Server. Each service is packaged as a Service Archive or SAR and each SAR is individually hot-deployable, making it extremely easy to extend JBoss.
Aspect Layer
The aspect layer is based on the Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) model. A long running tradition of the JBoss Application Server is the concept of interceptors. Interceptors enable the system to transparently add the behavior provided by the services into any objects. The JBoss EJB container, for example, is built as a pre-packaged set of interceptors. You can easily add or remove interceptors based upon your specific needs. Our latest 4.0 release of the JBoss Application Server simplifies programming by allowing you to easily weave in these aspects with tag-driven development, a bit like C#.
Application Layer
This is where your applications reside. Your applications can greatly leverage the vast infrastructure capabilities of JBoss regardless of whether you utilize the container services directly (programmatically) or by using the AOP layer and tag-driven aspects to add behaviors to your objects. We offer a number of very useful features such as No Compilation that have made JBoss Application Server the choice for serious Java developers.
|
|