I'm running JBoss 4.2.2. I have an MDB that I want to control programmatically. Specifically I do not want the MDB to start automatically when the application server starts up, but instead start it programmatically.

I can think of a few different strategies by which this might be accomplished, but I'm not sure if these are possible or how to do about it.

1) Do not deploy the MDB via annotations or xml descriptor, but rather through some programmatic API.
2) Allow the MDBContainer to be created but prevent it from starting, it can then be started via the MBean.
3) Set the pool size to 0 and then increase it programmatically.

Any thoughts?

Regards,
Nicko