You can check out a sample of the book on the Packt Publishing website.

The book is excellent for beginners and because of that I give it 3.5 stars of 5.

Back in January I was about to embark on a new Java enterprise project. For the past few years I’ve mainly been doing Glassfish-based projects, but being frustrated with some of its features I decided to look into the JBoss Application Server. Prior to JavaEE 5 I used JBoss (4.0) and was very happy with it. Its ability to configure every aspect of the application server using XML files is fantastic when exercising continuous integration/deployment. Anyway, I changed to Glassfish due to its support for JavaEE5. So to catch up on the latest development in JBoss I decided to get “JBoss AS 5 Development” by Francesco Marchioni from Packt Publishing. Wow, was I surprised. The book was really excellent. The book starts with instructions on how to setup JBoss and get started. This was followed with a chapter on the new features of JBoss 5. The remaining of the book focuses on developing JavaEE5 components and configuring JBoss to get the most out of your applications. One of the things I really liked about this book was how many of the advice could easily be applied to other application servers. The main reason why I think this book is awesome is because it is great for developers who want to tweak and understand their application server. Many developers are use to having other people setup their application in production environments, but with this book you’ll gain the confidence to configure your application and server for a production environment.

Every application server should have a book like this!

You can check out a free chapter of the book here

a) No examination of RESTful client APIs such as the Jersey Client API. The author may not have felt that it was necessary since RESTful clients can be implemented using a plain Java HttpURLConnection or the Commons HTTP Clients API (Used in the book).

b) Security aspects are only mentioned in the passing. It would have been very helpful to the reader if there were a few actual examples of protecting a RESTful service using security realms and SSL, followed by examples on how to access protected services.

c) Lastly integration with EJBs is not discussed. It is simply mentioned that they can be integrated. I was shocked to find that in the reference implementation of Java Enterprise 6 there is no dependency injection of EJBs into a restful service using the @EJB annotation. Instead one would have to manually connect to the EJB using JNDI, or implement the RESTful service as an EJB (this problem is not the authors fault!! but it would have saved me a few hours if this short coming was explained in the book).

Overall I’m very pleased with the book, it is great and easy to read. It has given me (a RESTful noob) confidence in using and implementing RESTful services in a production setup.

3.5 of 5 stars!

In my next post I will try to uncover some of the shortcomings of the books with examples for JavaEE 6 (GlassFish).

As a “glad to be back” gesture here is a reviewed of Packt Publishing’s JBoss RichFaces 3.3 by Demetrio Filocamo, which I was involved in (as a reviewer) earlier this year.

I’ve always loved JavaServer Faces. I believe it is the closest you get to writing real object-oriented web-based solutions. Don’t get me wrong, I use and like many web frameworks, but JSF has to be my favourite. However, one of the big problems with JSF is that it is pretty basic out-of-the-box. This is completely intended as JSF is supposed to solve the low-level issues in developing web-based solutions, and leave the sophisticated user interface components to component developers, much like Swing. What makes JSF really powerful are component libraries like JBoss RichFaces, ICEFaces, and PrimeFaces. There has been a ton of books focusing on the core of JavaServer Faces (my personal favourite is JSF in Action by Kito Mann) but they all seem to stop when it is getting interesting; using component libraries to enhance your applications. It was therefore a pleasure to read and review this book about RichFaces 3.3.

The book is a good 273 pages well-suited for JSF beginners and experts alike. The book assumes that you are already familiar with JSF, so if you don’t already grasp the topics of managed beans, page navigation, validators and converters, you might want to start somewhere else. It starts out explaining how RichFaces fits in the JSF world and how to set up your own environment for developing RichFaces applications. Once you’ve gotten started Demetrio takes the reader through a “Contact manager” case study, spanning eight chapters, touching on all the essential areas of RichFaces. One of the great things about this book is that Demetrio carefully explains each step and technique used so that the reader doesn’t get confused or left wondering. All too often you read books where you have to consult Google before getting it, but this is not one of those books. My two favourite chapters are Chapter 9 and 11, which explains how to create a new skin for your RichFaces applications and how to develop custom components respectively. Both these areas are overlooked by many developers who end up writing twice as much code to style their components or provide frequently used composite components. In my opinion the only drawback is that many of the code examples is based on JBoss Seam rather than plain JSF.

I can strongly recommend this book to any JSF developer who wants to take their application to the next level with RichFaces. Four and a half stars out of five!

I absolutely loved the book. I knew that I would love the book when I read part of the disclaimer: “If our tone seems too known-it-allish, bear with us. We think it’s better to present ideas in bold strokes than to be wishy-washy about it. If that comes off as cocky or arrogant, so be it. We’d rather be provocative than water every down with “it depends…”“. It is so refreshing to read something that is written with confidence and not some generic advice that can mean everything and nothing.

The book takes you through the stages of launching a web application from staffing, to interface design, to pricing and post-launch activities. Each chapter deals with a specific stage of the launch and provide easy-to-read, snappy, no bull advices on how to go about the given stage. Although I don’t agree with everything in the book it is very enlighting, refreshing and entertaining. It reminds me a lot about the book “How to become a CEO- The Rules for Rising to the Top of Any Organization” by Jeffrey J Fox, which I can recommend for a quick entertaining read.

It’s a must read for everything developing web applications. I’ll give this book five stars out of five!!

It was a great experience that I hope that I’ll be able to relive in the near future on other book writing projects. What I liked about the book was the focus on the array of JSF components under the MyFaces Apache project. Most people seem to think that MyFaces is simply an implementation of the JavaServer Faces specification. MyFaces is an umbrella project for JavaServer Faces related technologies. The most famous of the sub-projects is the Tomahawk components project which provides a lot of useful JSF component that I certainly couldn’t live without.

The focus of the book is on technologies under the Apache MyFaces project as well as the Facelets technology. Facelets is another very important JSF technology that deserves more attention from the community. There are lots of people using Facelets, but little development is going on to make it truly professional.

The book is not for newcomers to JSF, but for programmers already familiar with the basics of JSF. If you are looking to get familiar with JSF I can highly recommend JSF In Action by Kito D. Mann published by Manning.

Thanks to Zubin Wadia and Hazem Saleh for making the project a great experience!