Author: Javid Jamae, Peter Johnson
Publisher: Manning Publications Co., 2009
ISBN: 978-1-933988-02-3, $31.49 (amazon.com)
Reviewer: John Griffin ( This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it )

This book covers a wide variety of technologies and shows you how to configure those technologies specifically for use in the JBoss Application Server. Simple examples are provided that illustrate the technologies and then walkthroughs showing the steps necessary to configure things such as deployment descriptors, access control, and encryption are conducted.
A nice feature of the book is that at the end of each chapter is a References section with links to various additional information articles dealing with the technologies of the chapters and others related topics as well.
The book is written from a programmer’s point of view. Any programmer that uses the JBoss Application Server in his or her daily routine will benefit from reading this book. The book goes beyond mere coding to look at what it take to get an application configured and into production.

Summary of Contents

The book's 15 chapters are divided into four sections. Part 1 covers JBoss Application Server (JBoss AS) basics, how it’s configured, and how applications are deployed. Part 2 gets into individual Java EE technologies, such as web applications, enterprise applications, and messaging, and describes their configuration in detail. Part 3 covers the JBoss Portal, describing portal administration and configuration. Finally, Part 4 covers topics that you’ll want to consider when going into production—things such as performance tuning, clustering.

Chapter 1 gives you a 10,000-foot view of JBoss AS by showing you how to download, install, run, and deploy into it. You’ll learn about the installation structure and where important server configuration files go.
    Chapter 2 provides a first look at configuring the application server. You’ll learn how the application server is architected and, from there, how you go about configuring it. Administration tools are also covered.
    Chapter 3 discusses deploying applications and contains a discussion of class loaders. Common deployment errors and their solutions are presented.
    Chapter 4 introduces you to security in JBoss AS. Starting  authentication and authorization and how these concepts are implemented in JBoss AS. Configuring security in JBoss and demonstrating how you can access security data from a database, LDAP, or other security datastores is discussed.
    Chapter 5 discusses the JBoss Web Server and how to build, deploy and configure web applications.
    Chapter 6 merges the discussions in chapter 4 and chapter 5 to show you how to configure security for web applications.
    Chapter 7 talks about EJB applications and the EJB server, the heart of JBoss AS. structuring, deploying, and configuring EJB applications is covered. Then, configuring the application server, allowing you to change the communication transport and secure EJB applications, is discussed.
    Chapter 8 concerns configuring JBoss Messaging, A simple messaging client application is presented and then expanded to include a message-driven EJB and a message-driven POJO.
    Chapter 9 covers JAX-WS–based web services. A brief introduction to web services is presented and then simple POJO-based web service and its client. The example is expanded by converting the web service into an EJB, and developing a C# client for the web service.
    Chapters 10 and 11 provide an introduction into the JBoss Portal. Chapter 10 starts with a description of portals in general and the JBoss Portal in particular. Installing  the Portal and setting it up to use a database us next.
    In chapter 11, you’ll learn how to use the Content Management System (CMS) that comes with the JBoss Portal, and how to define access control.
    Chapter 12 introduces clustering. This chapter talks about the basics of clustering and shows the location of all the configuration files and how to configure the underlying clustering services. You’ll set up a simple cluster in this chapter and learn how to configure JGroups and JBoss Cache.
    Chapter 13 builds on this background from chapter 12 to show you how to configure clustering for specific services. HTTP load balancing and  session replication, how to cluster session EJBs, how to cluster entities, and how to configure high-availability JNDI are discussed.
    Chapter 14 is the performance chapter. Tuning the hardware, operating system, database, JVM, application server, and your application are covered. Sizing the Java heap, and tips on how to interpret thread dumps to pinpoint performance issues within your code are also presented    Chapter 15 is the final chapter and ends with a checklist of items you’ll want to consider when moving your applications into production.
    Appendix A discusses JNDI.
    Appendix B covers last-minute changes to JBoss AS that were made too late to be included in the earlier chapters because they had already gone to the printer. The authors held off on sending this appendix to the printer for as long as possible to get you all of the latest JBoss AS developments.

Opinion

This reviewer has bought every JBoss related book that he could lay his hands trying to glean as much information as he could. Everyone of those books covered some aspects of JBoss well and others not so well. In each case the information was not of as much use as I had hoped. Now there is Manning's JBOSS in Action.
    This book IS as comprehensive as it can be and still remain at a manageable size (all told 496 pages). It doesn't suffer from the same affliction of many comprehensive books in that the content often languishes due to the breath of the subject matter. The authors, do a good job with what they cover.
    With its focus on configuration topics, this book is also ideal for use by system administrators who need to configure and deploy applications to the JBoss Application Server. Many of the chapter introductions guide administrators, pointing out the sections on which they should focus.
    Along with the JBoss reference documentation this is THE JBoss book to have. In some pleces it is better than the reference. All in all this reviewer highly recommends this book for everyone interested in JBoss.