10.3 Management Tool Access: The MEJB

Before covering all of the application server components that are represented in JSR 77, let's discuss the mechanism by which management tools will connect to and communicate with application servers. There is no standard defined in JSR 3 for what JMX connectors look like or how code in one JVM can remotely access the JMX agent in another JVM and its registered MBeans. Any remote access mechanism is beyond the scope of the JMX 1.0 specification.

Because every J2EE-compliant application server product is required to support Enterprise JavaBeans functionality, it made sense to the JSR 77 expert group that application server products would be able to support the use of an EJB to remotely access the management system. This means that the only remote access mechanism that is explicitly required by JSR 77 is the Management EJB (MEJB), a session EJB that exposes JMX MBeanServer methods to remote clients .

An important part of the J2EE Management specification is that there are provisions for managing application servers using other management systems besides JMX, such as WBEM ^[10] and SNMP. ^[11] Although the implementations of these other access mechanisms are not defined by JSR 77, it is reasonable to assume that most vendors will build protocol adapters from these other systems to JMX, rather than provide a completely separate route to the management functions in parallel with JMX.