Before reading this book, I already knew the author, Francesco Marchioni, because of his web site – http://www.mastertheboss.com/ – which is dedicated to JBoss. So it was with enthusiasm that I wished to get a copy of the book and I was not disappointed. Indeed the book is like the web site : practical, rich in samples and useful information.
The book uses JBoss 5. It was published in december 2009, when the first version of JBoss 6 was becoming available and starting to implement Java EE 6. But the book is still up to date since it describes functionalities of JBoss that are more or less independant of the versions of Java EE.
The book is made of 14 chapters. As usual with the books from the Packt Publishing collection, there is a resume at the end of each chapter which recapitulates the main subjects.
The first 3 chapters describe the installation of JBoss, the new features and the configuration of services (logs, database connection, transactions, use of the JMX console and the administration console based on Jopr).
Chapter 4 is dedicated to the EJB container in JBoss since the session beans (EJB 3) are being developed. There is coding, theoretical explanations (for instance the session beans life cycle) and practical explanations (for instance how to configure the size of the pool of stateless session beans in JBoss).
Chapter 5 is about the persistence and a project is developed in Eclipse, using entity beans and the Java Persistence API (JPA).
Chapter 6 uses JSF 1.2 for the creation of a web application. The author describes the Web server inside JBoss and which uses Apache Tomcat.
Chapter 7 uses JMS with Message-Driven Beans and JBoss Messaging which replaces JBoss MQ. Again, there are nice explanations : theoretical and practical.
Chapter 8 shows the use of Hibernate with JBoss Tools / Hibernate Tools.
Chapters 9 to 12 go into the heart of JBoss AS with explanations of JMX, the MBeans and the management of resources from the administration console. Web Services are developed and deployed in JBoss WS.
Clustering of JBoss AS servers is not forgotten : there are explanations on the configuration needed for load balancing and the use of JBoss Cache to synchronise data in a cluster, among many other explanations.
Clustering of JBoss AS servers is not forgotten : there are explanations on the configuration needed for load balancing and the use of JBoss Cache to synchronise data in a cluster, among many other explanations.
Finally I found chapters 13 and 14 on security very complete. The author writes about everything : JAAS, JBossSX, certificates, securing EJB, Web Services encryption …
What I liked the most : The many illustrations (of the console, the file system structure in JBoss, the screenshots of Eclipse …), the concrete samples, the simple explanations.
What I liked the least : one might have liked to read more details about certains subjects but that is not a negative thing because the author gives the basic explanations needed to investigate further if necessary.
You can order the book on PacktPub web site.
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