JBoss Overview

What is JBoss?
JBoss is a Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) compatible application
server. It has full support for J2EE Web Services and the Service
Oriented Architecture (SOA). It Supports the Aspect Oriented
Programming (AOP) model for developing middleware solutions. It
tightly integrates with an existing object persistence framework called
Hibernate. It improves clustering and distributed caching support with
an internal caching architecture.

J2EE Compliance
JBoss is J2EE 1.4 compliant application server.
• Supports J2EE Web Services including JAX-RPC (Java API for XML
for Remote Procedure Call)
• Leverages standard J2EE components (e.g. EJB) to provide scalable
and secure Web Service environment.
• Implements JMS (Java Messaging Service) 1.1 specification which
has a domain independent approach to client programming
• Implements JCA (Java Connector Architecture) 1.5 specification
which adds support for life cycle management of resource adapters,
worker thread management, as well as transaction and message
inflow from the resource adaptor to application server.
• Implements JACC (Java Authorization Contract for Containers)
specification which is a permission based mechanism for
externalizing the authorization decision for accessing the EJB
methods and web resources.
• Implements the EJB (Enterprise Java Bean) 2.1 specification which
extends the message driven bean contract to support other
messaging types in addition to JMS

Server Configuration and Services

1. Minimal: This configuration starts the JBoss microkernel, JMX
2. Mbean Server and JNDI services.
3. Standard: This configuration starts all the J2EE services in JBoss’s
optimized class loader.
4. Default: In this configuration, all the J2EE services are deployed
and all the components are compartmentalized.
5. All: It starts all the services including the clustering.

JBoss AOP support

Aspect Oriented middleware is the key innovation in JBoss application
server. It simplifies the middleware application development and
allows the developers to extend the contained services. JBoss is
shipped with several pre-packaged aspects to support security,
transaction and asynchronous threads in plain old Java objects
(POJOs).

Hibernate Integration
Hibernate is an object persistence framework developed by JBoss. It
maps Java objects to tables in a relational database and vice versa.
The jboss-hibernate.deployer service provides Hibernate framework
libraries to all the applications on the server.

Clustering and Caching

The distributed cache architecture for clustering is built on TreeCache
which is based on JGroups. In a clustered environment, the user
session is replicated; so if one server fails, the users would be moved
to fail-over servers without loss of data.

JBoss Architecture and its components

Detailed Documentation: JBoss Application Server