Tomcat Admin Web App and JMX

Tomcat has provided an Admin webapp, which sits inside $CATALINA_HOME/server/webapps in order to access classes contained in Tomcat jars, to make it easy to configure webapps, for instance, to add a DataSource to a webapp.

As seen from its soource code, the Admin webapp simply creates JMX MBeans (managed bean), and save them to a MBean server. Tomcat MBean server then rewrites Tomcat server.xml and webapps/webapp/META-INF/context.xml.

The JMX Remote API specification details how an LDAP server can be used to store and retrieve information about JMX connectors exposed by JMX agents. JNDI is used to talk to an LDAP server.

MBeans can be viewed in the MBeans tab of jconsole.

Further digging on MBeans in Tomcat

• All key constructs in Tomcat, such as Server, Engine, Host and Context, are implemented as MBeans, see package org.apache.catalina.core.
  
• Since Tomcat makes use of Apache Commons Modeler to deliver the Model MBean support, mbeans-descriptors.xml (read by Apache Commons Modeler) appears in many packages that contain MBeans.
• Tomcat uses the MBean server implementation provided by JVM.
• The Server and Context MBeans support operations to store their configurations, which are delegated to the StoreConfig MBean that implements the logic of rewriting various Tomcat configuration files, see package org.apache.catalina.storeconfig in container/modules/storeconfig.
• org.apache.catalina.storeconfig implements a StoreConfigLifecycleListener that registers the StoreConfig MBean right after Tomcat is started. StoreConfigLifecycleListener is configured in Tomcat server.xml.

The information above is based on Tomcat 5.5.27.