GlassFish Administration [Paperback]

Xuekun Kou (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 6, 2010

This book provides an in-depth tutorial on administering the GlassFish application server. Every chapter starts with a clear discussion of the involved concepts, followed by step-by-step instructions on how to perform the administrative task. Clear illustrations and complete working code examples are used to help you visualize the relevant topics.If you are a Java EE application developer and architect who builds and deploys Java EE, Ruby on Rails, and other supported applications for the GlassFish Application Server, then this book is for you. This book is also very valuable if you are an administrator responsible for maintaining the GlassFish Server runtime. Basic knowledge of Java EE 5 is assumed but you need not have any previous knowledge of GlassFish. Those who already know the basics of GlassFish will still find this book useful as they will gain knowledge of administration tasks.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Xuekun Kou

Xuekun Kou has been architecting, designing, and building enterprise Java applications since the early days of J2EE. He also trains architects and developers on the Java technology, software engineering, and software architecture. He has extensive experience with most application server products, and his experience with the GlassFish application server dates back to its ancestor, Sun Microsystems' application server series: iPlanet, Sun ONE, and Sun Java System application server. He holds degrees from the Florida State University and the University of Science and Technology of China.

Product Details

• Paperback: 284 pages
• Publisher: Packt Publishing (January 6, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1847196500
• ISBN-13: 978-1847196507
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,112,887 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars GlassFish Administration -- a developer's perspective, December 29, 2009

By 

Richard J. Wagner - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: GlassFish Administration (Paperback)

Book Review of "GlassFish Administration", Packt Publishing

(A reprint from the original article [...])

This book is meant to be a resource for users of the GlassFish application server. It covers many aspects of GlassFish use, including installation, configuration, application deployment, clustering, performance monitoring, and more. I would believe this book is appropriate for Enterprise Java administrators of all experience levels.

The book is generously illustrated, often times making use of screen shots to help users navigate the excellent GlassFish administrative UI. Better yet, the book also provides the Command Line equivalents wherever the UI is shown. These handy tips will allow experienced administrators to script installations, significantly cutting down both time and errors.

The CLI tips are just one example of the author's mastery of advanced server control issues. The author, Xuekun Koum, clearly understands the needs of enterprise server administrators and clearly spells out many best practices. For this reason, I would recommend this book for anyone planning to use GlassFish in a production environment. The chapters on performance tuning, monitoring, and security alone will make this book worthwhile for that audience.

In addition to that audience, I would also recommend this book to Enterprise Java developers who wish to keep abreast of best coding practices for the Java EE platform. Have you ever seen a coding demo given by Sun engineers? Using Netbeans and GlassFish, they are usually able to quickly generate flawless Java EE applications using mostly plain intuitive Java. (No hand-configuration of deployment descriptors!) This book, paired with a recent release of Netbeans and "Java EE 5 Development using GlassFish Application Server" (another Packt title) will allow you to knowledgeably generate Enterprise Java applications as easily as the Sun folks do. I'll be honest-- I'm usually not a NetBeans/GlassFish user, but this combination makes it drop-dead simple to generate entire applications in no time. Best of all, the generated source and configuration files are so clean that it's a snap to understand what each component does so you can brush up on how the whole things works. GlassFish does it's part by nicely bundling all the required resources (databases, application server instances, JMS providers, etc.), making them all very easy to administer. I've long thought Microsoft developers had a leg up on productivity given their excellent IDE and matching runtime environment, but after working with this toolset for a while I now believe the gap is closing.

I own some other titles on application server administration as well as this one. Frankly, I find this the most readable of these books. The instructions it provides are straightforward and very easy to follow. The author provides expert insights that probably came from many hours of working with GlassFish in different production settings. (Some of these ideas extend beyond current use of GlassFish, as well. In this regard, the book provides some best practices that should give the reader some wisdom without having to pay for it the hard way.) This book also touches on topics that really aren't specific to GlassFish, but rather are of interest to anyone working with an application server. Of particular interest in this area are sections on application monitoring and load balancing.

As for complaints, I have few. The primary thrust of the book is GlassFish 2, which is the current production mainstay. There is a chapter on GlassFish 3, but I wish the book were weighted a little more heavily towards version 3 so the book would maintain relevance longer. (In fairness to the author, I guess it's not possible to offer real-world experienced opinions on products that haven't been in use for much time. So I guess the version 2 / version 3 ratio is about right, realistically.) I wish this title contained a little of the content from some of Packt's other developer-centric titles (i.e. Netbeans tips). Other than those, I can't think of any other wants.

All things considered, this is a solid addition to any Java architect/developer's library. I'd urge you to check it out!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Glassfish Administration" by Xuekun Kou is accurate, concise and useful., January 18, 2010

By 

Dennis Gesker (Kalispell, MT USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: GlassFish Administration (Paperback)

"Glassfish Administration" by Xuekun Kou is accurate, concise and useful.

Computer manuals comprise an odd segment of the publishing industry. I suppose that this is because the books published in this segment generally have both a narrowly defined audience and scope and a short window of usefulness driven by the speed of evolution of the products they seek to address. This, sadly, seems to result in books of this kind falling into two general categories: Sparse works that cover little more than what the end user could have found in the product's install documentation or its included "readme" files and at the other extreme heavy tomes of dense material that make it difficult for the product end user to zero in on the essential information they require to address their immediate administration needs.

So, when I had been invited to review "GlassFish Administration" from Packt I was predisposed to believe that Mr. Kou's book would suffer from the same flaws as so many other system administration books: too short to be of use to anyone but those who are brand new to the product or of use to someone interested in becoming an expert in all nuances of the product. "Glassfish Administration" deviates from this pattern. I was pleased to find that Mr. Kou had written a well balanced handbook for Glassfish that addressed much of what is essential for making good use of what I consider to be an excellent product.

The book may also serve as a "bridge" manual for Glassfish development and production teams. This is to say that the book could be a useful tool to quickly get both your development teams and production teams to understand the platform and its capabilities from the same perspective with a minimum of fuss, regardless of where you project is in its development cycle. Many of us that use Glassfish are first exposed to the product as it is bundled with an IDE, typically Netbeans. What we find in Glassfish is a platform that, along with its associated development tools, is an excellent development platform that is pre-configured for a workstation environment in order to meet the needs of the developer. This is certainly a plus for the developer trying to get their code running but less than optimal for the administrator who will be responsible for the day to day "care and feeding" of the application as its deployed in the server stack.

For example, Kou's discussion of the alternate releases (pure open source release vs. the commercially supported release ) of the application server along with illustrations their different abilities and behaviors in a production environment along with chapters like "Configuring Clusters and High Availability" are useful for both the developer and administrator alike. If you are a project lead for a Glassfish application this material should be considered a prerequisite for all team members as your project enters its systems planning and pre-production phases. Misunderstandings and mis-communications at these stages can have the potential to drive expensive re-design changes back to developer which can be expensive. Use of Mr. Kou's book as "team support materials" or "bridge materials" at these stages may help mitigate this kind of risk.

"Glassfish Administration" also presents a pleasant physical product. The book is well formatted, topics flow logically and its use of fonts and screen shots is clear and consistent. Formatting that is "easy on the eyes" is, for someone who spends many hours looking and computer screens and reading programming and systems manuals, something that is appreciated in a book of this kind. Packt has done a nice job on this aspect of the product.

If you are looking for well written and balanced handbook in support of your Glassfish installation or application development project Xuekun Kou's "Glassfish Administration" needs to be on your short list of titles to consider.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Book for newbies, April 5, 2010

By 

Anita Karbowska "anitaka" (Warsaw, Poland) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: GlassFish Administration (Paperback)

Let's start from what I expected of the book. I'm JEE application developer who had some experience with two different JEE application server products. I always got to know different administrating tasks as I needed them. First my colleagues showed me how to handle very basic tasks so I could test my code and further explore administration console on my own. Then as I needed features like application security, access control, shared code, details about particular resource configuration I searched for solutions and tutorials on the web. Finally I decided that I should learn what is there readily available for me and what are the concepts behind it. That is why I decided to read this book.
Unfortunately, the book wasn't the answer. I wish I had it two years ago as I started my adventure with JEE. It is a set of basic step-by-step tutorials concerning main aspects of JEE server administration. The book assumes no prior knowledge of the topic. I would recommend it to a newbie in the area who has to or wants to tackle JEE server by himself. It can serve as a set of tutorials (colleague') that will help you to install GlassFish, show where to find administrative tools, help you navigate administration console, teach basic administration tasks and get you started.
What I liked about the book was that it starts with a chapter on server architecture before introducing any task and that every chapter starts with some kind of a architecture, problem, concepts overview with a diagram if possible. The explanations are very concise. If you didn't know anything about security, container architecture, messaging systems etc. you probably won't be an expert after reading two pages with basic definitions or big-picture components communication diagram but it will give you context to help you understand why does a particular task involve this many steps and why these steps are needed. Another thing I liked was that there was full command-line listings for every task and authors encouraged to use command-line administration console which is not that hard to learn but far more powerful than web-console. I also enjoyed these few tips from authors' experience and that they pointed to the most interesting, according them, open-source projects used in GlassFish server and useful tools for monitoring and troubleshooting.
There were also things I didn't like. In the first chapter there were screenshots of almost every step of the installation process, even if they didn't bring anything. The last chapter with GlassFish 3 overview, except of very little information on what's new in this version, contained detailed instructions on how to install GlassFish 3 and how to deploy applications to it although it was almost copy & paste of the information in previous chapters. For me they were not worth reading. Also there were too little tips from the authors. More advanced topics were only mentioned, which is good for a getting started book, but was a flaw for me.
I would recommend this book to total newbie who needs detailed instruction on how to start and a set of step-by-step tutorials on every topic in GlassFish administration. A person with little more experience will be rather disappointed as the book contains only very detailed (too detailed) instructions on basic tasks with only a few sections just naming more advanced topics.