F I R S T   S T E P S :   B R I N G   J B O S S   T O   L I F E  

deployed you will most likely not be able to see any web pages served by JBoss meaning that 

when you open a web server to see 

http://localhost:8080

 you would get an error page 

or an empty page.  

Instead, to check if JBoss is running, you should open a browser and point it to 

http://localhost:8082

 which is the html based admin of JBoss.  It will list all JBoss 

components (the MBeans) that are running. This page is served by the HTML Adaptor and 

is a way to manage JBoss

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. 

JBoss Startup Options 

You can easily configure JBoss to start with a different list of services in it.  From a totally 

stripped down JBoss where you would remove say WEB/JBoss and EJB/JBoss to only run 

JMX/JBoss with JCA/JBoss and JMS/JBoss as an embedded EAI engine up to the full 

clustered environment with all modules in it.  You can name a JBoss server configuration.  

Look under the  server  directory in your distributions.  You will see 3 different directories.  

One is called  minimal , one is called  default  and a last one is called  all .  These are 3 

different configurations.  It is the same JBoss engine running all of them but we predefine 

different modules by including their deployment descriptor in the  deploy  directory.  That's 

it.  To actually make use of the modularity of JBoss you should add files/remove files that 

define the services.  We will get to the format of these files later (SAR format) but for now 

suffice to say that  minimal  is the same server as  all  but with all modules removed.  The 

beauty of JBoss is that you can remove EVERYTHING and we can still call it JBoss (even 

though it is pretty much an empty VM running).   Thus you can avoid carrying around a lot 

of unnecessary files. To select the appropriate configuration, specify the directory name of 

the server environment with   c  option at startup time. To start JBoss 3 with the  all  

server environment would look like: 

run.bat  c all (or run.sh  c all under bash/cygwin) 

By the way, the scripts that run JBoss, by default use the  default  directory configuration.  

Again, the server configurations are added in the  server  directory of JBoss. Let's look in 

some detail at the 3 basic configurations. 

minimal: is the bare minimum required to start JBoss 3. It contains logging, JNDI 

server and URL deployment scanner to find new deployments. This is what you 

would use if you want to use JMX/JBoss to start your own services without anything 

else from J2EE. Say a SWING framework or embedded JBoss with no web.  There is 

no EJB container, JMS, clustering, no JSP, no JCA etc. Just the bare server 

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 In case you're REAL curious, try 

http://localhost:8080/jmx console

, which delves deeply into technical details  

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