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<document>

 <properties>
  <title>Commons</title>
  <author email="commons-dev@jakarta.apache.org">Commons Documentation Team</author>
 </properties>

 <body>

<section name="The Modeler Component">

<p>Java Management Extensions (JMX) is an API that facilitates building
management applications that can configure, and perform operations on, a
server application.  In general, each manageable component of the server
application is represented by a <em>Management Bean</em> (or MBean, for
short).  JMX defines three types of MBeans, of which <em>Model MBeans</em>
are the most flexible.  Model MBeans provide a way to define MBeans for
many different components, without having to write a specific MBean
implementation class for each one.</p>

<p>However, this power comes at a price.  It is necessary to set up a
substantial amount of metadata about each MBean, including the attributes
it should expose (similar to JavaBeans properties), the operations it should
make available (similar to calling methods of a Java object via reflection),
and other related information.  The <em>Modeler</em> component is designed to
make this process fairly painless -- the required metadata is configured from
an XML description of each Model MBean to be supported.  In addition,
Modeler provides a factory mechanism to create the actual Model MBean instances
themselves.</p>

<p>For further information, see the 
<a href="apidocs/org/apache/commons/modeler/package-summary.html"> package description</a> 
for the Modeler package.</p>

</section>


<section name="Releases">
    <p>
       See the <a href="downloads.html">downloads</a> page for information on obtaining releases.
    </p>
<br/>
</section>

<section name="Documentation">
  <p>
     The <a href="apidocs/index.html">JavaDoc API documents</a> are available online.
  </p>
</section>

</body>
</document>
