The Proxy Interface

In addition to the methods for accessing the attributes and operations of its MBean, all proxies implement the methods of the Proxy interface. This interface contains the methods for binding the proxy instance to the proxy handler which can fulfill its requests. The setServer method binds the proxy to the handler object. Setting the server to null effectively unbinds the proxy object. The result of the getServer method can indicate whether or not a proxy is bound and if so, it will return a reference to the handler object.

Because of the new design of the proxy mechanism, many methods in the Proxy interface are deprecated as of version 4.2 of the product. The functionality of the deprecated methods is preserved in the three non-deprecated methods, listed in the following table. See the Javadoc API of the Proxy interface for details.

Table 9-1 Non-Deprecated Methods of the Proxy Interface

ObjectInstance	getMBeanObjectInstance()
ProxyHandler	getServer()
void	setServer(ProxyHandler server)

Standard proxies may also implement the NotificationBroadcasterProxy interface if their corresponding MBean is a notification proxy. This interface contains the same addNotificationListener and removeNotificationListener methods that the MBean implements from the NotificationBroadcaster interface.

Applications that use proxies therefore have two ways to detect notification broadcasters. The first way relies on the implementation of the NotificationBroadcasterProxy interface which can be detected in the proxy's class inheritance. The second and more standard way is to look at the notifications listed in the MBean's metadata obtained by the getMBeanInfo method either from the server or through the proxy.

Generic proxies do not implement the NotificationBroadcasterProxy interface, so callers must use the MBean metadata for detecting broadcasters. In addition, generic proxies cannot register notification listeners, callers must do this directly through the server.