Chapter 1: Getting Started provides a high-level introduction to GlassFish. It also provides a detailed recipe for installing the GlassFish Server, and briefly introduces the Admin Console of GlassFish.

Chapter 2: Understanding the GlassFish Server Architecture provides a detailed discussion of the GlassFish administration infrastructure. It also introduces the tools and utilities used to perform common administrative tasks.

Chapter 3: Managing Applications on GlassFish provides you with an introduction to application management and deployment in GlassFish, and gives you some hands-on experience of working on deploying different types of simple applications.

Chapter 4: Configuring Containers and Essential Services provides you with a clear understanding of the container architecture, and how these containers and services work together to support applications deployed to the GlassFish Server.

Chapter 5: Configuring GlassFish Resources provides you with an introduction to resource management and deployment in GlassFish.

Chapter 6: Configuring JMS Resources provides you with an introduction to configuring JMS resources in GlassFish. This chapter also shows you how to configure the MDB container.

Chapter 7: Securing GlassFish provides an introduction to the GlassFish Server's security features and covers the essential services and capabilities of the GlassFish Server.

Chapter 8: Monitoring GlassFish discusses the monitoring features implemented in GlassFish, and introduces several useful utilities that we can use to further improve our ability to monitor GlassFish.

Chapter 9: Configuring Clusters and High Availability shows you how to configure clusters for the GlassFish Server and use a load balancer to distribute load across the server instances in the cluster.

Chapter 10: Troubleshooting and Tuning GlassFish discusses the troubleshooting and performance tuning aspects of the GlassFish Server and also focuses on several useful tools that help us identify and resolve some very common issues.

Chapter 11: Working with GlassFish 3 provides an overview of the upcoming GlassFish 3. It focuses on the new features of GlassFish 3, how to install and administer GlassFish 3, and how to deploy applications to the server.

In order to install and run GlassFish, all you need is a computer that runs a well-known operating system, such as Microsoft Windows, Sun Solaris, Open Solaris, Linux, or Mac OSX. You also need to install JDK 5 or 6, which can be downloaded from http://java.sun.com/javase. If you want to build and modify the applications provided along with this book, you can download and install the NetBeans IDE, which is available at http://netbeans.org.

If you are a Java EE application developer and architect who builds and deploys Java EE, Ruby on Rails, or other supported applications for the GlassFish Application Server, then this book is for you. This book is also very valuable if you are an administrator responsible for maintaining the GlassFish Server runtime. Basic knowledge of Java EE 5 is assumed but you need not have any previous knowledge of GlassFish. Those who already know the basics of GlassFish will still find this book useful as they will gain knowledge of administration tasks.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."

A block of code is set as follows:

CREATE TABLE users (
userid varchar(10) NOT NULL,
password varchar(40) DEFAULT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (userid)
);

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

CREATE TABLE users (
userid varchar(10) NOT NULL,
password varchar(40) DEFAULT NULL
PRIMARY KEY (userid)
);

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

# cd $AS_INSTALL/bin
# ./asadmin create-jdbc-resource –connectionpoolid MySQLPool jdbc/DevDS

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen".

Feedback from our readers is always welcome. Let us know what you think about this book—what you liked or may have disliked. Reader feedback is important for us to develop titles that you really get the most out of.

To send us general feedback, simply send an email to <[email protected]>, and mention the book title via the subject of your message.

If there is a book that you need and would like to see us publish, please send us a note in the SUGGEST A TITLE form on www.packtpub.com or email <[email protected]>.

If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book on, see our author guide on www.packtpub.com/authors.

Now that you are the proud owner of a Packt book, we have a number of things to help you to get the most from your purchase.