Chapter 5. Microcontainer

JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 5.0 uses the Microcontainer to integrate enterprise services together with a Servlet/JSP container, EJB container, deployers and management utilities in order to provide a standard Java EE environment. If you need additional services, you can deploy these on top of Java EE to provide the functionality you need. Likewise any services that you do not need can be removed by changing the configuration. You can even use the Microcontainer to do this in other environments such as Tomcat and GlassFish by plugging in different classloading models during the service deployment phase.

Since JBoss Microcontainer is very lightweight and deals with POJOs, it can also be used to deploy services into a Java ME runtime environment. This opens up new possibilities for mobile applications that can now take advantage of enterprise services without requiring a full JEE application server. As with other lightweight containers, JBoss Microcontainer uses dependency injection to wire individual POJOs together to create services. Configuration is performed using either annotations or XML depending on where the information is best located. Unit testing is made extremely simple thanks to a helper class that extends JUnit to setup the test environment, allowing you to access POJOs and services from your test methods using just a few lines of code.