"Java EE 5 Development using GlassFish Application Server" written by David R. Heffelfinger has recently been published by Packt Publishing and is intended to guide developers "through the development and deployment of Java EE 5 compliant applications on GlassFish version 2".


The book assumes that the reader has experience of Java but no previous knowledge of Java EE or J2EE. As such, this is a great book for developers who are new to this arena.

The book starts with an overview of what GlassFish is, what its competitors are and why we should use GlassFish. The introduction continues to provide details of how to download, install and verify GlassFish and finishes by exploring some of the management tasks associated with GlassFish such as managing domains, creating connection pools and configuring datasources.

Several sections of the book cover web development, including chapters on Servlets, JSPs, the JSP standard tag library and JSF. These chapters take the reader from initial concepts "What is a servlet?" and gradually build up on their knowledge by describing how to build JSF applications.

Database connectivity is covered in the book, however this assumes that the reader has some experience of SQL. The book starts by covering JDBC and how this can be used from within Java EE applications, and continues to discuss the Java Persistence API (JPA). This includes details on how to configure entity relationships with JPA, such as one-to-one and many-to-many relationships. After details and examples on how to use JPA, the reader is shown how to integrate JSF and JPA.

Moving away from web development, the book describes the Java Message Service (JMS) and how queues and topics can be defined within GlassFish and then accessed via Java code. This is taken further in the section on enterprise beans where the book discusses Message Driven Beans and how they interact with the application server. This section on enterprise beans also includes details about session beans and discusses life cycles, transactions and security.

Security is discussed in detail and explanations are provided regarding what security realms are within GlassFish and how they can be configured. Details are included about the file, certificate, LDAP, Solaris, JDBC and custom realms.

The final aspect of Java EE discussed within the book is web services. This chapter discusses how to create, deploy and test JAX-WS web services and includes details on sending attachments from web service methods and securing web services.

The final chapter of the book takes the reader beyond the Java EE standard and describes additional 3rd party technologies, namely Facelets, Ajax4jsf and Seam and describes how applications developed with these technologies can be deployed to GlassFish.


This is a highly recommended book for developers who are new to Java EE 5 development or the GlassFish Application Server.

Further details of this book can be found here.