The JBoss custom namespace

Starting with version 1.2, Snowdrop includes a custom Spring namespace for JBoss AS. The goals of this custom namespace is to simplify the development of Spring applications that run on JBoss, by reducing the amount of proprietary code and improving portability.

The amount of proprietary code is reduced because of replacing bean definitions that include references to specific JBoss classes with namespace-based constructs. All the knowledge about the proprietary classes is encapsulated in the namespace handlers.

The applications are more portable because certain proprietary classes may change when upgrading to a different version of the application server. In such cases, the runtime will be detected automatically by Snowdrop which will set up beans using the classes that are appropriate for that specific runtime.

The custom namespace can be set up as follows:

<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
       xmlns:jboss="http://www.jboss.org/schema/spring"
       xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
       xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd
       http://www.jboss.org/schema/snowdrop http://www.jboss.org/schema/snowdrop/snowdrop.xsd">

Accessing the default JBoss MBean Server

The default MBean server of JBoss AS can be accessed as follows:

<jboss:mbean-server/>

The bean will be installed with the default id 'mbeanServer'. If necessary, developers can specify a different bean name:

<jboss:mbean-server id="customName"/>

JCA/JMS support beans

Spring JMS message listeners (including message-driven POJOs) can use a JCA-based MessageListenerContainer. The configuration of a JCA-based listener container in Spring requires the setup of a number of beans based on application-server specific classes. Using the JBoss custom namespace, the ResourceAdapter and ActivationSpec configuration can be set up as follows:

    <jboss:activation-spec-factory id="activationSpecFactory" subscriptionName="jca-example" useDLQ="false"/>

    <jboss:resource-adapter id="resourceAdapter"/>

which can be further used in a JCA message listener configuration:

 <jms:jca-listener-container resource-adapter="resourceAdapter" acknowledge="auto" activation-spec-factory="activationSpecFactory">
        <jms:listener destination="/someDestination" ref="messageDrivenPojo" method="pojoHandlerMethod"/>
 </jms:jca-listener-container>