Tomcat: The Definitive Guide Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)I just got this book saturday (it's now monday) and this book has already helped me solve two problems and clairify my Tomcat thinking. This book is the best Tomcat book yet for Administrators. I have used the others (Professional Apache-Tomcat, Mastering Tomcat Development, and Apache-Jakarta Tomcat), but this one has been the best. It is very well organized and has some great helps in it. It does not try to cover everything, but it focuses on some. For example, Tomcat 3 is not covered by this book. Mod_webapp is not covered, but mod_jk2 is very well covered. The authors covers how to secure Tomcat through chroot (using a special file they ported from OpenBSD called jbchroot.c), run Tomcat as an unpriviledged user on port 80, Clustering with or without Apache, Apache integration is given REAL coverage. The best thing about this book is the focus on Administration and not development, this is obviously for administrators. The other books were focused on developers and were either way to short or had way too much scattered and confused information. Admins like things well organized and consistant.
If you are a Sys Admin and need a book on Tomcat administration, get this book and forget about the rest.

Click Here to see more reviews about: Tomcat: The Definitive Guide

Product Description:
Tomcat: The Definitive Guide offers something for everyone who uses Tomcat.System and network administrators will find detailed instructions on installation, configuration, and maintenance. For users, it supplies insightful information on how to deploy Tomcat. And seasoned enterprise Java developers will have a complete reference to setting up, running, and using this powerful software.Tomcat: The Definitive Guide covers all major platforms, including Windows, Solaris, Linux, and Mac OS X, contains details on Tomcat configuration files, and has a quick-start guide to get developers up and running with Java servlets and JavaServer Pages.If you've struggled with this powerful yet demanding technology in the past, this book will provide the answers you need.

Get 24% OFF

Want to buy Tomcat: The Definitive Guide at other amazon sites? Click the corresponding icon below:

The Buildmeister's Guide: Achieving Agile Software Delivery Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)The whole build and release space is getting lots of attention these days. There seem to be many different vendors coming out with "automated frameworks", many different "best practices" and a wealth of opinions. This book is a nice introduction to the space and should help you to make sense of it all.

I liked the clear definitions of the build process, patterns, frequencies and how they apply to different processes (Agile/Enterprise) and language (Java/.NET/C++) environments. The book documents a number of common sense tips (a la the Pragmatic Programmers books) and they would certainly be good to keep in mind if you are implementing or improving a build process. There is really little technical content, i.e. how can I use Apache Ant, GNU Make etc... but the author states that this is not the purpose of the book - although some examples would have been nice to back up the tips!

A lot of the information has already been published on the auhtors portal: [...], so I would go there first to see what type of information is included in the book. I believe the book is being helped to fund the maintenance of this site - so if you like it you can keep it going by purchasing a copy - you can decide!

In summary The Buildmeister's Guide is an easy and enjoyable read about a relatively new space. It is by no means perfect but I would recommend it if your were a "buildmeister", developer or integrator on a project.

Click Here to see more reviews about: The Buildmeister's Guide: Achieving Agile Software Delivery

Product Description:
The Buildmeister's Guide researches and documents the build process in detail. It's aim is to increase awareness of the build process and to raise the level and quality of discussion that occurs around it. The book looks at how the build process affects and is affected by different software development languages and methods, and what intrinsic value a "well defined" build process can bring to an organization. It defines the set of skills and capabilities that implementers of the build process should posses, and also a framework for a generic best practice build process with tips and guidelines on how to implement it. Whether you are a software developer, manager or integrator, this book will help you understand the importance of the build process to your organization and what role you will need to play in it.
The Second Edition has been significantly rewritten and enhanced with new technical content. In particular, content related to Agile Software Delivery, its definition and how it can be achieved has been included in order to make the book more relevant, consistent and readable.

Get 10% OFF

Want to buy The Buildmeister's Guide: Achieving Agile Software Delivery at other amazon sites? Click the corresponding icon below:

Pro Apache Beehive (Expert's Voice in Java) Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)I have been using beehive since it was in alpha, but, I still found some parts of this book informative, enough to where I may have to change one of my applications, to make it better.

I did find that there was too much talk about BEAs product, but, for those that may be coming from that framework to beehive, this may be important.

Understanding how to use the various development tools, such as Pollinate, is useful, so their coverage of that is reasonable.

I do think that if you are looking for an intro to intermediate book on beehive this is a fantastic book.

Click Here to see more reviews about: Pro Apache Beehive (Expert's Voice in Java)

Product Description:

If you want exposure to the new open source lightweight SOA-driven Apache Beehive framework project, then pick up Pro Apache Beehive, the first book on this MVC Web framework, which is increasingly gaining interest in the Eclipse community through Eclipse Pollinate. Author Kunal Mittal addresses specific Beehive topics such as page flows, controls, JSR 181 web services, XMLBeans and more.This book proceeds to describe how these technologies are used in WebLogic Workshop, and how other IDEs are extending support for these technologies. Mittal also compares PageFlows in Workshop to the Standard.

Get 34% OFF

Want to buy Pro Apache Beehive (Expert's Voice in Java) at other amazon sites? Click the corresponding icon below:

Pro J2ME Polish: Open Source Wireless Java Tools Suite Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)When you first learn J2ME, you learn about this fantasy world where all devices follow the J2ME specification to a tee. But in the real world, because of the interpretive nature of the specifications, no two devices really implement the specification exactly the same. So this requires either targeting a particular device or have many versions of you app to run on different devices.

Man what a pain. But that is where J2ME Polish comes to the rescue. J2ME Polish provides pre-compiler directives to allow you to write code such that J2ME Polish's build script can automatically create different versions for you on the fly however you want. There is a lot more to J2ME Polish than just that, but this is a book review.

So let's get to that review. Well, first Robert Virkus is J2ME Polish, well he is the architect and lead programmer for J2ME Polish. Who better to write a book about it? Consider this book the hard copy of the manual for J2ME Polish. If you are going to use J2ME Polish, then this book is a must. It is the reference book that you will need to find anything you need to know about J2ME Polish.

Now, it isn't really a read all the way through the book and you can be J2ME Polish expert. You really need to be actually using J2ME Polish at the time, to better grasp what is being explained. The book can be hard to understand, not because of the writing, but because J2ME Polish is feature rich and there is lots to learn.

I highly recommend using J2ME Polish and buying this book if you will be developing for more than one device, and also to get their cool looking GUI screens, rather than MIDP 2.0 High Level GUIs.

Click Here to see more reviews about: Pro J2ME Polish: Open Source Wireless Java Tools Suite

Product Description:

Pro J2ME Polish: Open Source Wireless Java Tools Suite is written for wireless and other mobile Java programmers who want to "polish" their efficiency and acquire in-depth knowledge about programming real-world J2ME applications. It also uncovers all common device limitations and quirks, and explains how these can be circumvented.The book describes the Open Source tools collection, "J2ME Polish," and shows how the tools can be used for creating professional J2ME applications. Building multiple devices and multiple locales is easy after studying this book. Author Robert Virkus offers tips about the more hidden features of J2ME Polish, like the logging framework, the preprocessor, and the game-engine. You will learn to polish up your applications with the powerful GUI that enables you to design standard J2ME applications with simple CSS text files. You'll also learn to write portable, fast applications while using all available features on your target devices simultaneously.

Get 10% OFF

Want to buy Pro J2ME Polish: Open Source Wireless Java Tools Suite at other amazon sites? Click the corresponding icon below:

Beginning POJOs: Lightweight Java Web Development Using Plain Old Java Objects in Spring, Hibernate, and Tapestry (Beginning from Novice to Professional) Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Missourians -- residents of the "Show Me State" -- are sure to appreciate this unusual book on lightweight Java development with "Plain Old Java Objects." In a fast-paced 10 chapters, Brian Sam-Bodden builds a single complete application, all the way through. Believe it or else, he starts with a detailed design, then talks about fundamental tools like Eclipse and Ant, and before you know it he's implemented the persistence and business tiers. Screenshots and detailed instructions will help you get your environment installed and set up in no time.

The first five chapters of the book are astonishingly linear as the application is developed to this point, with each technology choice presented as a fait accompli. In this day of political correctness and cultural relativism, many authors bend over backwards to consider all the alternatives to every decision they make, and I felt that Sam-Bodden's approach was incredibly refreshing. Eclipse, Ant, Hibernate, EJB3 on JBoss. Take it or leave it.

I was therefore almost disappointed when, in Chapters 6 and 7, he considers several different alternative implementations of the business and presentation tiers. Still, showing how to use Tapestry and especially Spring offsets the raised eyebrows some of you might have on hearing that a book on POJOs was advocating using EJBs -- even though the radically reworked EJB3 specification does indeed let you use Plain Old Java Objects to implement the business layer.

From this point, the book gets more conventional, with the traditional tacked-on chapter about testing that nevertheless asks you to do testing as an integral part of development.

Although some of the technology choices and development approaches may stretch your personal definition of the term "lightweight," this is still the best book on end-to-end development of modern enterprise applications that I've seen. If you have a hint of the Missourian in you, and you'd like someone to show you how things are done, this book was written with you in mind.

Click Here to see more reviews about: Beginning POJOs: Lightweight Java Web Development Using Plain Old Java Objects in Spring, Hibernate, and Tapestry (Beginning from Novice to Professional)

Product Description:
Beginning POJOs: From Novice to Professional introduces you to Open Source lightweight Web development using Plain Old Java Objects (POJO) and the tools and frameworks that enable this.Tier by tier, this book guides you through the construction of complex but lightweight enterprise Java-based Web applications centered around several major open source lightweight frameworks, including the use of Spring, Hibernate, Tapestry, and JBoss (including the new Lightweight JBoss Seam). Additional support comes from the most successful and prevalent open source tools: Eclipse and Ant, and the increasingly popular TestNG. This book is ideal if you're new to open source and lightweight Java. You'll learn how to build a complete enterprise Java-based web application from scratch, and how to integrate the different open source frameworks to achieve this goal. You'll also learn techniques for rapidly developing such applications.

Want to buy Beginning POJOs: Lightweight Java Web Development Using Plain Old Java Objects in Spring, Hibernate, and Tapestry (Beginning from Novice to Professional) at other amazon sites? Click the corresponding icon below:

Professional Apache Tomcat 5 (Programmer to Programmer) Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Development of the Apache project's Tomcat JSP and Servlet engine continues apace, and again, Wrox has done a good job in swiftly getting a book to market which covers the latest version.
Wrox's earlier book by many of the same authors, 'Professional Apache Tomcat' covered versions 3 and 4. This book no longer contains any material specific to version 3, but has had a major overhaul and concentrates on Tomcat 5, though it's still useful and relevant to administrators working with version 4.1 and up.
Like its predecessor, the book covers the installation and management of Tomcat in great depth on both Unix and Windows. Its Unix coverage is geared towards Linux in favour of any other version of Unix, but in practice there's nothing particularly Linux specific and users of other Unix variants will have no problems following the examples.
As with the previous edition, the first two chapters provide background to the Apache project, J2EE and the evolution of web application technologies from CGI to JSP. Detailed chapters on installation and architecture follow. Only installation of the Tomcat binaries is here though; building Tomcat from source with Ant is not discussed at all (however, Ant is referred to throughout the book, mainly in relation to application building and deployment, and gets an appendix of its own). The architecture description is unchanged from the previous edition, but remains an excellent overview of Tomcat's internal components.
And on to the nuts and bolts. A lot of space is given to the new web-based administration tool (itself a web application handled by Tomcat), but at all points the underlying affects on Tomcat's raw XML configuration files is made clear, so the command line junkies - or those who choose not to enable the Administration Tool at all - are catered for in parallel with the point-and-click brigade. Web application configuration and management is much expanded, now covering Servlet 2.4 descriptors as well as those for 2.3.
Tomcat's HTTP connectors, employed when Tomcat is set up as a stand alone web and application server are described in a single chapter, but new to this book are details of using the SSI and CGI servlets which are new features of Tomcat 4.x and 5.
For non-trivial installations, one would wish to integrate Tomcat with a web server, creating an environment in which the web server delegates dynamic content to Tomcat which otherwise no longer handles HTTP directly. There are a number of protocols available for Tomcat which provide the connection to a web server. As these protocols have stabilised in Tomcat, so the book no longer covers the older, largely deprecated connectors beyond a brief description of each. It then concentrates almost solely on the JK2 implementation of AJP.
This whole area is a lot clearer than it was in the earlier book: a short chapter provides the background and describes the protocols used to connect the web server and Tomcat, followed by a chapter devoted to each of Apache (for both Unix and Windows) and Microsoft's IIS web server using the JK2 connector. I was a little disappointed to find that Sun's web server gets no mention at all, particularly as up-to-date official documentation in relation to it appears to be non-existent. Nonetheless, what's here for Apache and IIS is very good; Apache users get a better deal than their IIS counterparts though - the load balancing and SSL integration sections are far more complete in the IIS chapter.
That completes the first half of the book, and for many uses will provide more than enough information to get a good understanding of Tomcat and a working service. Six more chapters go into great detail about Tomcat's other features. Separate chapters exploring JDBC connectivity, the new JMX features of version 5 and Java class loaders really earns the book its Professional tag. Arguably more useful (in my case at least) are the chapters dedicated to security, clustering for fail-safe operation and embedding Tomcat within an application - absolutely everything is here. The chapter on server load testing proved to be a great help to me just for the inclusion of the use of JMeter, another Apache project which is useful for all manner of web server benchmarking.
Tomcat's documentation is more than adequate for quickly setting up a Tomcat server, but dig much deeper and it quickly becomes difficult to find what you're looking for. Having a book like this with everything to hand makes life a lot easier, and in any case it's worth much more than the official documentation.
Criticisms? I'd like to have seen an appendix or two giving a summary of the main Tomcat configuration files workers2.properties and server.xml; as it is not quite everything is covered and what is spread across different chapters. At the moment I'm working with Sun's web server and Tomcat and it would have been great to have a chapter dedicated to this particular setup, particularly as far as JK2 is concerned.
Wrox had some difficulties last year when its parent company collapsed, but now that Wiley have taken over, it's good to see them back on their feet and continuing to produce books like this, complete with their familiar red covers (...and dodgy author photographs). Highly recommended.

Click Here to see more reviews about: Professional Apache Tomcat 5 (Programmer to Programmer)

Product Description:
What is this book about?
Professional Apache Tomcat 5 shows system administrators and Java developers how to install, configure, and run the Tomcat server. The authors focus on solving real-world problems encountered in all phases of server administration, including the following:

Installation
Configuration
Managing class loaders and connectors
Security
Shared hosting and clustering
System testing

The book provides comprehensive coverage of all of the latest features of Tomcat Releases 4.1 and 5.0. (Tomcat 5.0, which is expected to release at the end of this year, supports JSP 2.0 and Servlets 2.4. Given that many companies are slow to upgrade, the authors also cover Release 4.1.).

Get 24% OFF

Want to buy Professional Apache Tomcat 5 (Programmer to Programmer) at other amazon sites? Click the corresponding icon below:

Service Oriented Java Business Integration: Enterprise Service Bus integration solutions for Java developers Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Read the introductory texts on Service Oriented Architecture and Web Services Description Language? Perhaps you've noticed that those sometimes frustratingly refer to more elaborate business processes that can be built atop them. How to do this? Now SOA and WSDL are strictly independent of an implementing programming language. But just suppose that you're willing to pick Java.

One result is that you can turn to this book. It shows recent, state of the art, Java packages and standards, that use SOA and WSDL. Java Business Integration is still fairly new and the text gives its basics. The applications are manifold. One major case is to extend or incorporate EJBs across a set of WSDL machines. If you recall, EJBs predate WSDL by several years. And most books on EJB talk about using it within a system of computers run by the same company. The blending of existing EJBs with a WSDL setup is otherwise awkward, without JBI.

You might even consider JBI as a successor to EJB, in the Web Services environment. JBI proponents would argue it's much more than that. But in terms of explaining JBI, especially to people who've invested time in coding EJBs, it's a useful concept.

The book also talks about existing ways to learn and build JBI components. Foremost amongst these is the use of the Service Mix container. It holds JBI components. That is its task. Just like EJBs need an EJB container. But Service Mix is also a JBI component in its own right. For Java programmers, the analogy is to something like a JPanel that is a container for Swing widgets, but which is also a widget. Hence, Service Mix has a nice modular design that makes it interoperable with other JBI containers that might be developed.

Click Here to see more reviews about: Service Oriented Java Business Integration: Enterprise Service Bus integration solutions for Java developers

Product Description:
In Detail
The goal of Java Business Integration (JBI) is to allow components and services to be integrated in a vendor-independent way, allowing users and vendors to plug and play.
Java Business Integration (JBI) is a specification aiming to define a Service Provider Interface for integration containers so that integration components written for these containers are portable across containers and also integrate with other components or services using standard protocols and formats. JBI is based on JSR 208, which is an extension of Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE).
This book first discusses the various integration approaches available and introduces the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), a new architectural pattern that facilitates integrating services. ESB provides mediation services including routing and transformation. Java Business Integration (JBI) provides a collaboration framework that provides standard interfaces for integration components and protocols to plug into, thus allowing the assembly of Service-Oriented Integration (SOI) frameworks following the ESB pattern. Once JBI and ESB are introduced, we look at how we have been doing service integration without either of these using traditional J2EE. The book then slowly introduces ESB and, with the help of code, showcases how easily things can be done using JBI.
What you will learn from this book?

Assembling services and porting them across containers using JBI
Exposing EJB as a WSDL-compliant service across firewalls
Binding remote services to ESB to be consumed internally
Exposing local components in ESB like POJO as externally accessible WSDL-compliant services
Providing a web service gateway for external consumers
Accessing web services over a reliable transport channel like JMS
Implementing web service versioning using ESB
Implementing service aggregation at ESB
Transactions, Security, Clustering, and JMX in ESB

Approach
The book covers all concepts with examples that can be built, deployed, and run by readers using the Apache Ant tool in Apache ServiceMix, which is an open-source Enterprise Service Bus that combines the functionality of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and an Event Driven Architecture (EDA).
The aim of this book is to prepare an architect or developer for building integration solutions using ESB. To that end, this book takes a practical approach, emphasizing how to get things done in ServiceMix with code. When needed, it delves into the theoretical aspects of ESB, and such discussions are supplemented with working samples. The book, thus, distils some of the knowledge that has emerged over the last decade in the realm of Java Integration.
Who this book is written for?
This book is aimed at Java developers and integration architects who want to become proficient with the Java Business Integration (JBI) standard. Readers should have some experience with Java and have developed and deployed applications in the past, but need no previous knowledge of JBI. The book can also be useful to anyone who is struggling to understand ESB and how it differs from other architectures and to understand its position in SOA.
This book primarily targets IT professionals in the field of SOA and Integration solutions--in other words, intermediate to advanced users. You are likely to find the book useful if you fall into any of the following categories:

A programmer, designer, or architect in Java who wants to learn and code in JBI or ESB.
A programmer, designer, or architect who doesn't normally code in Java can still benefit from this book, since we 'assemble integration components' using XML with little to no Java code.
An IT Manager or an Officer who knows well about SOA or SOI but want to see something in code (you can adorn your flashy presentations with some live code too).

Get 15% OFF

Want to buy Service Oriented Java Business Integration: Enterprise Service Bus integration solutions for Java developers at other amazon sites? Click the corresponding icon below: