One of the key design principles of Fabric3 is extensibility: middleware should maintain a small footprint and only include the features required by an application. In keeping with this, Fabric3 is architected as a small kernel with additional functionality provided through extensions. This allows users to choose the capabilities they need or provide them through custom extensions.
The base runtime distribution contains only core functionality. Most applications will require one or more extensions. Fabric3 has bundled commonly used extensions in a series set of profiles, which can be installed as aggregates in a runtime. Fabric3 profiles include:
- JPA/Hibernate with XA transactions
- JMS with XA transactions
- Web Services
- REST/JAX-RS
- Web 2.0
- Web Applications
- Spring
- Timers
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