Creating Event Listeners

An event listener gathers statistics from events that an event provider sends. To enable an add-on component to gather statistics from events, create listeners to receive events from the event provider. The listener can receive events from the add-on component in which the listener is created and from other components.

To create an event listener, write a Java class to represent the listener. The listener can be any Java object.

An event listener also represents a component's statistics. To enable the Application Server Management Extensions (AMX) to expose the statistics to client applications, annotate the declaration of the class with the org.glassfish.gmbal.ManagedObject annotation.

Ensure that the class that you write meets these requirements:

• The return value of all callback methods in the listener must be void.

• Because the methods of your event provider class may be entered by multiple threads, the listener must be thread safe.

• The listener must have the same restrictions as a Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) application. For example, the listener cannot open server sockets, or create threads.

A listener is called in the same thread as the event method. As a result, the listener can use thread locals. If the monitored system allows access to thread locals, the listener can access thread locals of the monitored system.

A listener that is not registered to listen for events is never called by the framework. Therefore, unregistered listeners do not consume any computing resources, such as memory or processor cycles.