java Management Extensions (JMX) is an API that facilitates building management
applications that can configure, and perform operations on, a server applica
-tion. In general, each manageable component of the server application is re
-presented by a Management Bean (or MBean, for short). JMX defines three types
of MBeans, of which Model MBeans 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.

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 (si
-milar to calling methods of a Java object via reflection), and other related
information. The Modeler component is designed to make this process fairly pain
-less -- 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.

WWW: http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/modeler/