JBoss 4.0 - The Official Guide [Paperback]

The JBoss Group (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0672326485 | ISBN-13: 978-0672326486 | Publication Date: April 30, 2005 | Edition: 1

If you need to understand how JBoss works, why not learn it from the people who created it? JBoss 4.0 — The Official Guide is the authoritative resource recognized as the official print documentation for JBoss 4.0. The only book for advanced JBoss users, this guide presents a complete understanding to configuring and using JBoss 4.0. It is fully up-to-date with the new features and changes in JBoss 4.0, including those used to integrate development with Eclipse, incorporate Aspect-Oriented Programming and implement J2EE 1.4 functionality months ahead of the commercial competition. Get under the hood and explore everything that JBoss 4.0 can offer you with JBoss 4.0 — The Official Guide.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Scott Stark, Ph.D. started out as a chemical engineer and graduated with a B.S. from the University of Washington, and he later earned a Ph.D. from the University of Delaware. While he was at Delaware, it became apparent that computers and programming were to be his passion, so he made the study of applying massively parallel computers to difficult chemical engineering problems the subject of his Ph.D. research. It has been all about distributed programming ever since. Scott currently serves as the chief technology officer of JBoss, Inc., an elite services company based out of Atlanta.

Marc Fleury, Ph.D. started in sales at Sun Microsystems France. A graduate of the Ecole Polytechnique, France's top engineering school, and an ex-lieutenant in the paratroopers, he has a master's in theoretical physics from the ENS ULM and a Ph.D. in physics for work he did as a visiting scientist at MIT (working with X-ray lasers). Marc currently serves as the president of JBoss, Inc.

Norman Richards is a JBoss developer and is currently the maintainer of this guide. He graduated with a B.S. in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin, where he researched evolving neural networks to play the game of go. Norman is the co-author of XDoclet in Action (Manning Publications).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

What This Book Covers

The primary focus of this book is the presentation of the standard JBoss 4.0 architecture components, from the perspectives of both their configuration and architecture. As a user of a standard JBoss distribution, you will gain an understanding of how to configure the standard components. Note that this book is not an introduction to J2EE or how to use J2EE in applications. It focuses on the internal details of the JBoss server architecture and how an implementation of a given J2EE container can be configured and extended.

As you read this book, you will gain a good understanding of the architecture and inte-gration of the standard components, which should enable you to extend or replace the standard components for your infrastructure needs. This book also shows you how to obtain the JBoss source code, along with how to build and debug the JBoss server.

About JBoss

JBoss Application Server was first released in 1999. JBoss Group was founded in 2001, in order to provide expert technical support services. JBoss Group was incorporated in 2004 as JBoss Inc.:

• Ownership—JBoss Inc. is employee owned and is venture backed by Matrix Partners, Accel Partners, and Intel.

• Coverage—JBoss Inc. covers North America and Europe on a direct basis. JBoss Inc. provides coverage worldwide via its extensive authorized partner network.

• Mission statement—JBoss Inc. will provide middleware technology that offers the lowest cost of ownership via open-source software licenses that are backed up by expert technical support services delivered by both JBoss Inc. and our authorized service partners. Our goal is to be the safe choice for enterprises and software providers alike.

• Company description—JBoss Inc. is in the business of providing superior technical support to its customers. By backing up its immensely popular open-source Java products with technical support from the source, JBoss has become the new safe choice for middleware. Customers such as Apple, Best Western, Borland, Computer Associates, HP, Iona, La Quinta, MCI, Mitre, Nielsen Media Research, Siemens, Sonic, SEMA, Unisys, WebMethods, and Wells Fargo have embraced the Professional Open Source model whereby no-cost, open-source products are supported by the core development team. By providing direct access to the core developers, JBoss Inc. eliminates the runaround common with most commercial software providers.

Professional Open Source from JBoss Inc. offers the following:

• Standards-based and stable Java middleware technology

• No-cost, open-source product licenses

• Backing by a professional and expert support staff

• Comprehensive services, including professional support, training, and consulting

• A very large and active community of developers

• An extensive worldwide network of authorized and certified partners

Benefits of Professional Open Source from JBoss Inc. include the following:

• Lowest possible total cost of ownership

• Reliable and safe technology

• Support, accountability, and trust from a stable company

• Expedited problem resolution compared to commercial software vendors

About Open Source

The basic idea behind open source is very simple: When programmers can read, re- distribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves: People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs. And this can happen at a speed that, if you are used to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing. Open source is an often-misunderstood term that relates to free software. The Open Source Initiative (OSI) website provides a number of resources that define the various aspects of open source, including a definition of open source at http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.html. The following quote from the OSI home page nicely summarizes the key aspects as they relate to JBoss:

We in the open source community have learned that this rapid evolutionary process produces better software than the traditional closed model, in which only a very few programmers can see the source and everybody else must blindly use an opaque block of bits.

Open Source Initiative exists to make this case to the commercial world.

Open source software is an idea whose time has finally come. For twenty years it has been building momentum in the technical cultures that built the Internet and the World Wide Web. Now it's breaking out into the commercial world, and that's changing all the rules. Are you ready?

—The Open Source Initiative

About Professional Open Source

JBoss is the leader in the second generation of open source, which JBoss Inc. has termed Professional Open Source. The Professional Open Source methodology is based on the following:

• It hires and pays experts in the open-source community to write exceptional and innovative software full time.

• It uses only open-source licenses that are friendly to end-user IT shops, independent software vendors, and the community itself.

• Directly and through its authorized partners, JBoss Inc. delivers the best support services available, and all of them are backed up by the real product experts.

• Unlike first-generation open-source providers, JBoss Inc. controls the direction and source code for its projects. It can ensure that all bug fixes and patches are rolled into future versions of its products.

• By combining enterprise-proven technology, business-friendly open-source licenses, and world-class support services, JBoss Inc. has made Professional Open Source the safe choice for end-user enterprises and independent software vendors alike.

What's New in JBoss 4.0

The JBoss Application Server (JBoss AS) 4.0 is a production-ready Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) application server. It builds on the highly successful JBoss 3.2 line of open-source Java application servers with improved standards compliance and major feature enhancements. JBoss AS 4.0 offers the same level of quality and stability customers have grown to expect from JBoss 3.2. Key features of JBoss AS 4.0 include the following:

• It is officially certified to be fully compliant to the J2EE 1.4 specification. JBoss AS 4.0 is the first production-ready J2EE 1.4 application server in the industry.

• It provides full support for J2EE Web Services and the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA).

• It supports the aspect-oriented programming (AOP) model for developing middleware solutions. JBoss AOP greatly improves developer productivity.

• It tightly integrates with Hibernate, the world's most popular object persistence framework, developed by JBoss, inside the application server container.

• It improves clustering and distributed caching support, with a new internal caching architecture.

J2EE Certification and Standards Compliance

JBoss AS 4.0 is the industry's first officially certified J2EE 1.4 application server. The certification guarantees that JBoss AS 4.0 conforms to the formal J2EE specification. This allows developers to safely reuse J2EE components (for example, Enterprise JavaBeans EJBs) across different application servers. For example, a developer could easily migrate an EJB developed for WebLogic or WebSphere to JBoss. The certification makes JBoss 4.0 a safe upgrading choice for both existing JBoss users and users of other J2EE application servers.

Compared with JBoss AS 3.2, JBoss AS 4.0 implements the following new J2EE specifications in order to be J2EE 1.4 compliant:

• JBoss AS 4.0 supports J2EE Web Services, including JAX-RPC (Java API for XML for Remote Procedure Call) and Web Services for J2EE Architecture, which l...

Product Details

• Paperback: 648 pages
• Publisher: Sams; 1 edition (April 30, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0672326485
• ISBN-13: 978-0672326486
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.9 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,197,265 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A good reference manual, June 4, 2005

By 

Brian A. Egge (Sydney, Australia) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: JBoss 4.0 - The Official Guide (Paperback)

If you like to read pages of XML and code examples than this book is for you. If you looking for load balancing & clustering strategies, then you'll be disappointed.

This book thoughly covers the JBoss software, but is lite on advice and guides. Nearly half the book is code examples, DTD diagrams, and XML.

I think this quote from the book is a good recommendation for the rest of it: "JBossMQ fully implements the JMS specification; therefore, the best JBossMQ user guide is the JMS specification."

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Very disappointed, November 3, 2005

By 

Javid Jamae (Houston, TX USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: JBoss 4.0 - The Official Guide (Paperback)

Have you ever been to a technical presentation on a product where the speaker goes off on the inner-workings of their product without giving you any background or without explaining terms and concepts very well? Or, perhaps you've worked with or met a person who starts talking to you about something technical, assuming that you already know the context of everything they're talking about, but you're thinking "huh?". Well this is an entire book that is written in that style.

I bought this book because I have Norman Richards' "JBoss: A Developer Notebook" and I loved it. Though I realized the format of this book was different, I expected the quality to be as good. I was very wrong. This book is very esoteric and would have received a bit fat "F", had my technical writing professor from college graded it.

My first gripe is that if you flip through the book, it seems like most of the book consists of snapshots, code, DTDs, and schemas. They could have done a much better job selecting relevant information. Thus, the book is very bloated with content that is very impractical. I think a previous reviewer already hit on this point.

My second gripe is that the book seems to be written for somebody who is (or wants to be) a contributor to the JBoss project. Most people would buy a book on JBoss to learn how to deploy / configure applications or to read about practical design decisions. The book focuses heavily on the internal workings and design decisions of JBoss. Don't get me wrong, I think that JBoss has a great architecture, but I wouldn't expect the second chapter of the book to be about the JMX microkernel architecture.

My third gripe is that they don't give you background on many things. They just start talking about some JBoss component or class without explaining the fundamental concepts to you in layman's terms.

My fourth gripe is that the book lacks decent structure; it parades back and forth between topics. For example, in the second chapter, they start talking about MBeans, then they diverge and go into a very deep (and very hard to follow) discussion about the classloader architecture. Then, they come back to talking about XMBeans. Why didn't they just talking about all the different types of MBeans in order? If I wanted to reference this book, it would be a nightmare.

Some parts are slightly better than others, but the lesser of two evils is still evil. Overall I'm very disappointed and would not recommend spending your money on this book.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars JBoss Expert Guide, November 16, 2005

By 

Adam Sroka (Marina Del Rey, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: JBoss 4.0 - The Official Guide (Paperback)

This is a good book. However, I believe that the prerequisites for this book include both an *expert* level understanding of J2EE (A strong awareness of Java EE 5 would be preferred) and a very high level of understanding of JBoss itself. Plus, you'd have to want to know a whole lot about how JBoss works and why. Most of the information in this book is not needed to successfully develop on, architect for, or administer JBoss. The two audiences who will benefit the most are those who wish to contribute to JBoss and those who seek JBoss professional certification.