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    In the old JBoss forum  there was a sticky that explained what the "Spring Integration" topic was about. Moving to Clearspace, this kind of information will be provided by the articles in this section.

    So, what aspect of the JBoss/Spring integration are we concerned with?

     

    It's not really about any type of Spring-based applications that run in JBoss. When it comes to general Spring/JavaEE integration, either the Spring forums or the specific topics of the JBoss forum (EJB3, JCA, JTA, JSF etc.) are very good sources of information.

     

    What is Snowdrop and where can I find it?

     

    This forum is mostly about Snowdrop, a utility library that provides a deeper integration between Spring and JBoss-specific technologies, such as the JBoss Microcontainer for example. Its reason of existence is to provide either:

     

    • Spring extensions that build on top of the JBoss APIs, or
    • JBoss-specific components that integrate with Spring.

     

    A good example in the first category is the JBoss-specific LoadTimeWeaver. A Spring LoadTimeWeaver needs to have interact at a pretty low level with the classloader of an application server, so very often, an application-server specific implementation is needed, but Spring 2.5 and prior versions didn't provide one, which means that the feature wasn't really available on JBoss AS5. So, in this case, the project provides an implementation.

     

    In the same category you can find fixing major integration gaps. For example, issues such as SNOWDROP-4.

     

    A good example in the second category is the JBoss Spring Deployer. A Deployer is a JBoss AS-specific component, that is capable of detecting deployment units, parse metadata, register and instantiate the components contained in the deployment unit with the application server. It is based on the Microcontainer architecture of JBoss. So you can, for example, package your Spring beans in a separate jar, together with their context definition and deploy them separately. By doing so, they will become available to any other application that runs in the JBoss AS, and can consume them.

     

    And if you want to find out more about how this started, here's an older article by Ales Justin: http://java.sys-con.com/node/180386.

     

    What happens to the posts that don't fit the description above?

     

    As we said, this forum has a dedicated topic - if you have issues with the Snowdrop libraries, or the Spring Deployer, or just have some questions, or want to suggest some new functionality, please join the conversation. If you have questions which concern plain Spring usage, then perhaps this is not the best place for them and there is a chance that they will be removed. Thanks for considering this before posting and for your understanding.