Greg Munger said
I bought this book about 6 months ago to prepare for a projected move to the JBoss AS from Websphere. As with most technical books I read as much as I needed for the tasks at hand. My project seems to be cancelled, so I may not go back to this book, but I'd like to leave this review.
I believe this is the only book targeted at JBoss AS 5 configuration and management - that should earn it a couple of stars. On top of that this is one of the best written technical books I have recently encountered. The authors have clearly taken the extra effort to write a concise book (400 pages, it could easily be double the way most are written). There are no extracts of man pages, no bulky examples of pet projects.
One time as I was reading found myself asking a question - and a few paragraphs later there was a reference to that topic in another chapter ("if you are wondering about security see chapter XX"). The authors have a very good sense of what the reader is thinking.
Did the book answer my questions? Mostly. Though I wish there was more information on JMS persistence. And there are whole sections of the book (e.g. portal) that I skipped.
One more thing, worth a star, the book comes with a pdf version as well. I commute, and being able to refer to the text without juggling book and laptop is a huge benefit
Michael Davis said
I bought this book specifically for the chapters on Clustering and High Availability. I thought the author did an excellent job of explaining those topics, as well as giving examples of config files. They also walk the user through how to set up various configurations, which I thought was very helpful. Over all the book was well written and for the most part easy to follow.
Developpez.com writers said
I would like to begin by saying that I like the table of contents. It shows that JBoss is more than an application server since a full part is about JBoss Portal.
In the first part the authors tell us about the origins of the server (did you know that JBoss was originally called EJBoss and that it meant Enterprise Java Beans Open Source Software ?) and describe the installation of version 5, the deployment of applications and the configuration.
The structure of the server is described in detail with explanations on MBeans (managed beans, from the JSR 3) and the JMX console, illustrated with screenshots.
Then comes the deployment of an application, the declaration of a data source, the creation of an Hibernate archive (.har) ... All along, the authors explain the advantages of an application server.
The chapter on security is very interesting. The login modules of the JBoss SX framework, which uses JAAS, are described and illustrated with examples of XML configuration for each type of data source (database, LDAP, certificate ...).
The second part is about the configuration of JBoss Web server. Everything is explained : configuration files, WAR archive, the structure of an URL and even the JSF configuration.
The enterprise applications are not forgotten. On the contrary, since the authors go as far as giving us a nice overview of EJB 3 and packaging and deploying session beans.
The security of applications, at the enterprise (EJB) and web levels, programmatically and declaratively, is very detailed.
JBoss Messaging and Web Services are also detailed. The authors take the time to explain the technologies before explaining them with JBoss. That is a very nice approach.
The third part is entirely dedicated to JBoss Portal and it is nice again to see that the technologies are first introduced (Portlets, JSR-169, CMS ...).
The fourth part has a chapter about clustering, with the description of an example to do on a single server (vertical clustering). Very interesting, as much in the theorical part of clustering as in the JBoss configuration part. Plenty of notes on the tuning of JBoss, to improve the performances, are also provided.
And a chapter on things to do before going into production concludes this part.
What I liked in this book : the authors are sincere when they discuss the advantages but also the weaknesses of the application server, in comparison with others. For instance, they admit that there is no administration console as powerful as in Weblogic or Websphere, but Jopr is going in the right direction.
Each chapter ends with a summary and links about the reviewed topics.
What I liked the least in this book : the lack of chapter about the new administration console, Jopr. But that is due to the fact that it was not yet available when the book was being written.
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