5.6 Creating an MBean Using the instantiate Method

The last way of creating an MBean relies on the instantiate method of the MBean server. In addition, we can use a nondefault constructor to instantiate the class with a different behavior. This method is not demonstrated in the BaseAgent example, but as in Example 5–2, we instantiate and register the MBean in separate steps.

First, you instantiate the class using the instantiate method of the MBean server. This method lets you specify the constructor you want use when instantiating. Note that we could also have specified a constructor to the createMBean method in the previous example.

To specify a constructor, you must give an array of objects for the parameters and an array of strings that defines the signature. If these arrays are empty or null, the MBean server will try to use the default no-parameter constructor. If the class does not have a public no-parameter constructor, you must specify the parameters and signature of a valid public constructor.

One advantage of this creation method is that the instantiate method of the MBean server also supports class loaders. If any are registered in the MBean server, they will automatically be used if the class is not available locally. See Chapter 12, M-Let Class Loader for more information on class loading.

The main advantage of this method is that, like the first method of MBean creation, we retain a direct reference to the new object. The direct reference again enables us to use the MBean's shortcut methods explicitly.