Chapter 2. Managing the JBoss Application Server
This chapter covers
- Examining the JBoss AS architecture
- Configuring JBoss AS
- Examining the administration tools
- Exploring various MBeans
The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step; this adage from the Tao Te Ching, the book central to the Taoist school of Chinese philosophy, describes this chapter fairly well. JBoss in Action is all about managing the JBoss Application Server, and in this chapter, you take your first steps in such management, continuing your journey throughout the rest of the book.
JBoss AS provides a good out-of-the-box experience for application developers. You can download the application server, install it, run it, and even deploy applications to it, usually without having to do any configuration changes. It just runs.
After a while, you might want to do things like change the ports used, add new services or remove unwanted services, or change various configuration options; to do this, you need to know where to make such changes. Knowing how the application server is architected will clarify why the configuration is spread out among dozens of files instead of centralized in one location. Therefore, we start with a description of how JBoss AS is architected, and from there look at some files that govern the server configuration.