⁠Chapter 3. Introduction to Snowdrop

Snowdrop is a utility package that contains JBoss-specific extensions to the Spring Framework. These extensions are either:

extensions to Spring Framework classes that can be used wherever the generic implementations provided by the framework do not integrate correctly with JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.
extensions for deploying and running Spring applications with the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

The Snowdrop distribution contains two types of artifacts:

Utility archives: Libraries that contain utility classes and can be packaged in applications
Server-side components: Pre-packaged components that can be installed in the application server as subsystems.

The server-side components may include some of the utility libraries, where they are needed by the deployer or, respectively, subsystem.

Snowdrop provides the following utility libraries:

snowdrop-vfs.jar: A library that contains the support classes for resource scanning (scanning the classpath for bean definitions, or using "classpath*:"-style patterns).
snowdrop-weaving.jar: A library that contains the support classes for load-time weaving.
snowdrop-interceptors.jar: Contains utility classes used internally by the Spring deployer. It is not intended for direct use by developers.
snowdrop-namespace.jar: Custom namespace for easier configuration of beans that need access to JBoss internals (JMX server locator, JCA activation spec and resource adapter for JMS endpoints)

Snowdrop provides the following pre-packaged deployers and subsystems:

snowdrop-subsystem-as7.zip: This is a packaged distribution of the Spring subsystem for Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6, which bootstraps and registers the application contexts to be used by your Java EE applications.