Chapter 5. The MBeanServer

This chapter describes the MBeanServer, the heart of the JMX agent layer. The MBeanServer's primary responsibility is to provide a registry, with a common naming model, for the MBeans that management applications used to monitor and control JMX manageable resources. It also provides a symmetric interface to management resources: Management applications interact with MBeans, and MBeans interact with other MBeans, getting and setting MBean attributes and invoking MBean operations via the MBeanServer.

Because MBean access is mediated by the MBeanServer, a resource's management lifecycle revolves around the MBeanServer; the resource becomes manageable when the MBean that represents it is registered with the MBeanServer, the resource remains manageable while it is registered with the MBeanServer, and the resource finally ceases to be manageable when it is unregistered. The MBeanServer also provides the notification bus that routes the notifications emitted by active MBeans to their respective listeners.

At the time of this writing, no standard mechanism exists for remote access to an MBeanServer. As part of the Java Community Process, a group of JMX experts is working on Java Specification Request (JSR) 160, which will define a standard remote API for the MBeanServer.