Customer Reviews

JBoss: A Developer's Notebook

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1 star:		(1)

 

 

J2EE development is often seen as highly complex, and setting up the J2EE server from various vendors is nearly as bad. A good alternative to get running quickly is JBoss, a complete open source J2EE server which is designed to cut through all the complexity and vendor add-ons. A quick guide to get it running and working with it is JBoss - A Developer's Notebook by Normal Richards and Sam Griffith, Jr. (O'Reilly).

Contents: Installing and Running JBoss; Deploying an Application on JBoss; Creating a Complete Application; Connecting to a Real Database; Applying Security; Logging; Configuring Persistence; Managing and Monitoring JBoss; Rolling Out JBoss; Index

The Developer's Notebook series is a quirky format using a gridlined page with scribbled font text in the margins. You'll even find the occasional "water ring" on a page where a sweaty glass was set down. They're also small and to the point. It's not a step-by-step comprehensive tutorial, nor does it attempt to explain every last iota of information on the subject. It's a series of subjects followed by paragraphs of "How Do I Do That?" and "What Just Happened?" write-ups. This leads to a high degree of practicality and hands-on material.

Richards and Griffith have created a book that will be immensely useful to people who have some J2EE background or have worked with other J2EE servers before. By following the material, the reader can get the essentials necessary to start playing with JBoss in a matter of a couple of hours rather than days. If this is your very first exposure to J2EE, you won't get a lot of handholding here. There is the assumption of a certain level of background information. And if you're going to be using JBoss as a production-level J2EE server for your organization (yes, you *can* do that!), you'll probably want an additional book that goes into much more depth. But if you come in with proper expectations, it's a great resource.

Nice format, good writing, and a lot of meat packed into a small volume. Good job...

This book takes you on a run through JBoss. Running at lightning speed through installation, building your first application, doing some simple persistence stuff through EJB (if there is simple EJB persistence), and then into monitoring, logging and performance work. Sounds like a lot, right? It's certainly is. Especially in just over 130 pages. Yes, read that again, 130 pages. So this book is super light on exposition. Expect to be taken on a lightning ride. And if that works for you. If that's not for you. If, for example, JBoss is your first Java environment, then I would look elsewhere.

The book is a solid guide for getting started with JBoss. However, I would recommend this book to those who are looking to get started with J2EE development.

Obviously, you can't discuss JBoss without J2EE. The authors take you through a sample application from start to finish. This includes a wonderful overview of J2EE.

After this book, you should be able to delve into more complex topics related to J2EE and other application servers. I really wished this book was around before I started hacking J2EE on WebLogic, I would have chosen JBoss to begin my learning.

I love the format of these notebooks. Quick and good overview of what you need to know about several topics.

On to the specifics of this book. You get a great outline of what you can do with JBoss including some good introductory info on Java EE in general. Some will find the lack of detail irritating but its great for a quick overview of how the stuff is done 'in the real world'. For example in Chapter 3 aobut creating a 'real application' the topic of XDoclet is discussed but not in great detail (Norman Richards has a huge 350+ page book on XDoclet) leaving the (sometimes ardious) task of getting XDoclet working with ant as an exercise to the reader.

The authors do a great job of writing in an informal conversational way without being campy.

Specific Content:
1) Installing JBoss - everything you want to know about getting JBoss up and running. Any deficencies here are made up for in Chapter 9 on rolling out jboss.

2) Deploying Apps - the stuff you need to know about how to deploy, talks about auto-deploy and how to do exploded deployments.

3) Creating the complete app - I liked this chapter but I susspect that newbies will find the XDoclet stuff confusing. XDoclet is great and works like a champ but many people will wonder what is going on if they don't have previous XDoclet expierence.

4) Connecting to a real db - good stuff, esp liked the bit on monitoring. Lots of folks new to Java EE don't get that whole monitoring thing and this book talks about it a lot (in most chapters).

5) Secutiry - all you need to know to get started with secutring in JBoss, using LDAP & hashed passwords are covered which a lot of preliminary discussions seem to leave out.

6) Logging - welcome to the world of Log4J which should be really simple but somehow required lots of pages in lots of books to document. This chapter has what you need to know about to get logs going with JBoss. You are using remote debugging from your IDE though to debug your apps though aren't you?

7) Configuring Persistence - good quick over view to CMP and getting the CMP engine to manage your schema.

8) Managing and Monitoring JBoss - a whole chapter on how to manage JBoss. Lots of good info here.

9) Rolling out JBoss - all the stuff you might forget to do in turning on a production version of JBoss. All about security and closing the holes that you might not think to close (like the class download service).

Over all a great book and worth the $.

Enterprise Java can be a mysterious world, and navigating the configuration files of JBoss can be daunting at first. This book gets you going with an in-depth example and helpful notes.
(...)It is no surprise that JBoss: A Developer's Notebook was a top seller at JavaOne 2005. I look forward to other titles in the Developer's Notebook Series.

Being fun to read, lighthearted but full of content, compact and practical, this book is perfect for serious programmers. If you are about to implement an Internet application of any level of complexity whether it be a web application with a couple of servlets or an enterprise archive of entity/session/management beans, this book will get you there quickly. Also, having spent weeks with JBoss already, I still learned something new in every page...which indicates that whether you are experienced or beginner with JBoss, this book is useful. I hope to see more to come like this one, maybe exploring other complex or less known areas of JBoss, such as non-J2EE based persistence solutions, clustering or usage of second level cache.

This workbook touches on many different aspects of the JBoss application server. It is not for the advanced user, but for someone brand new to JBoss it's a great help in getting up and running quickly.

Well, I would say, it is pretty good. You feel like finishing this book off so quickly but at the same time imbibed enough information on JBoss. Very good reference material to keep beside always for both beginners and experience people too.

Excellent book on JBoss, the book is a easy read covering the ins and outs of JBoss from writing your app to, securing and managing the container. Very well presented with the cool notes on the sidebar which are worth reading all by themselves. The chapters are concise and to the point in presenting the ideas, this has become valuable resource on my desk.

If you are just now considering using JBoss then this is definitely the book for you. It covers the installation, configuration, and deployment of a J2EE application in a very concise and useful format. It presents the unique and useful features of JBoss in a simple format. If you are looking for a reference book that covers every little detail of JBoss then keep looking.