I would say that JBoss is a highly customisable app server built from a JMX backbone. If you really wanted to you could strip out much of the
J2EE stuff and shape it with your own components into your own java component server, with minimal hassle.
Of course, then it would be other than the JBoss J2EE server that it currently is.
[ September 13, 2002: Message edited by: George Brown ]