JBoss Advanced Documentation: Is it Worthwhile

[amnesiac]

Two questions:
1. Is the advanced documentation a physical book, or online docs?
2. Are they worthwhile?

I have been fiddling about with JBoss for a little while now, with no real access to any documentation, or any half decent tutorials (Please someone show me a decent CMP or BMP tutorial - a working moderatley complex tutorial would be a good thing, similar to the excellent J2ee Tutorial at Sun (HINT JBOSS PEOPLE!).

I'm sick of trying to figure this stuff out like a blind man doing a jigsaw puzzle. I get the feeling there must be many people feeling the same way out there. I wonder how many of those 100,000 weekly JBoss downloads are soon scrapped out of sheer frustration. Oh, and the free "getting Started" guide just plain sux. I refuse to read it. I'm sorry if that sounds plain ungrateful, but I believe in order to present complex technical information, the grammar and language must be of high standard, and it is far from that.

Your comments will be warmly regarded.

[juha]

> Oh, and the free "getting Started" guide
> just plain sux. I refuse to read it.

well, sux to be you then, blind man

[amnesiac]

Looks like you would have no problem reading that jibberish.

[jasonb]

1. Both. You can buy the 2.4 and JMX books on Amazon. The rest are pdf from Flashline.

2. I purchased the 2.4 pdf late last year, and the 3.0.3 pdf last week. If you want to learn how JBoss works under the hood, it is a fantastic reference. If you are looking for a tutorial and examples using JBoss, then I would recommend heading over to www.titan-books.com, and getting the free beta pdf of the JBoss companion workbook to O'Reilly's EJB bible by Monson-Haefal. I was able to compile and deploy the example code through Eclipse with just a minimal change to the Ant build file.

3. And yes. You do sound like an ungrateful bastard. JBoss is not software for developers who must have their asses wiped by others on a regular basis. I get frustrated sometimes, but I don't talk shit to the guys who give you the product for ZERO dollars.

Try the titan workbook.

-J

[xdeth]

jasonb-
Thanks for posting the info on the O'Reilly PDFs at titan-books. I had not seen that referenced anywhere else until this. I for one will be buying the advanced docs, if for no other reason than to support the superb efforts of this project. And of course from what I've read here and experienced using JBOSS so far.

[sgturner]

Its my personal opinion that its not up to JBoss to teach anyone J2EE technology, CMP, or BMP. Its expected that you know that stuff coming in the door. There are plenty of books and tutorials out there. Once you know that stuff, then the JBoss docs are very worthwile for showing you the JBoss specifics.

[amnesiac]

I dont want JBoss to teach me ejb or cmp/bmp technology, I just want them to teach me JBoss.

[casanova]

While I too may find getting my head around JBoss hard going, there is no denying the unbeatable value of $0!! These people work really hard doing what they love, so that other people can reap the benefits. I don't understand how anyone can be ungrateful for that.

I take the approach that my frustration and toe stubbing are due to my own ignorance and lack of experience - how dare we demand the people who are giving this stuff for free to take up hand holding.

I've found that if post questions on the forums with respect, most times you'll either get the answer you're looking for, or be pointed in the right direction.

Now, if only someone could tell me how to redeploy Tomcat non-hot deployed webapps remotely.........

[sgturner]

I take the approach that my frustration and toe stubbing are due to my own ignorance and lack of experience - how dare we demand the people who are giving this stuff for free to take up hand holding.


This is exactly the correct approach.

Now what is a "Tomcat non-hot deployed webapp" ??

[dbronk]

I too believe that when a product is free it is hard to expect the people working to bring the free product to life become hand holders. But, when they are advertising how it is so much better than Bea/IBM/etc., then I take notice. There is more to building a world class tool than the technical parts. It does not matter how fast it is, how much of the spec it follows, or how free it is. A world class tool should have world class docs. It is free and people always have a choice to not use JBoss. I for one, would really like to use it, but I don't have time to dig around the scattering of docs to find answers to questions that should be simple. I still have not gotten any answer to my virtual host questions, even after reposts. I have looked through the docs and it is either not there or, I hope probably, I have simply overlooked it. I need to be able to set multiple virtual hosts for a single war and I also need to set all requests to each IP (box has 10 ip's) to go to separate war files. I have not found this in the docs and since my post has been out their twice for weeks with no replies suggests that it is not in the docs or simply can not be done. If it can not be done then fine. It is very difficult to suggest JBoss to my clients when I also have to inform them that there is very limited docs and the ones that are their are lacking in Q/A.

[casanova]

Ok,
What I mean with the Tomcat non-hot deployed web app is this:
I have developed a web application which uses Tea (http://teatrove.sourceforge.net) as an alternative to JSP - mainly because it's cool and allows code reuse and heaps of other stuff. The only problem is that Tea requires the classpath specified and pathnames relative to JBoss\bin directory - I don't know how to do this with hot-deployed webapps, and assume you can't - so I want to work out how to stop/start Tomcat remotely for when I make changes to my servlet code to prevent Tomcat from crashing due to changed code.

Have a look at "http://www.jboss.org/modules/bb/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&t=forums/ for more info.

Thanks - any help or pointers with this would be greatly appreciated.

[jpoley]

to restart the app server from your IDE, you can count on ant

you can use the ftp ant task for putting war files to server
and then the telnet ant task for logging into that server and restarting it. (no ssh task yet)

http://jakarta.apache.org/ant/manual/OptionalTasks/ftp.html

http://jakarta.apache.org/ant/manual/OptionalTasks/telnet.html

[casanova]

Sorry,
Something I forgot to add is the fact that this is running on my ISP's box, and as such I only have ftp access to the box, not the ability to execute remote programs. This prevents me from using Telnet or things like PC Anywhere etc. That's why I'm keen to use the port 8082 / jmx-console admin interface to reload / restart the web apps. This is what is making it so difficult - there are lots of obvious work arounds, but none that I can use.
Of course the solution is to generate some cash and host the damn thing myself!! :) - problem solved!

Now I just need to make some money.....

Seriously though, thanks for your feedback. I've just started looking into the JBoss 3.04 / Tomcat 4.1.12 bundle, and I've seen somewhere that this provides more control over what I'm after - is this the case?

[javamac]

If you don't like it, Id ask for your money back :)

[davinlg]

I respectfully disagree with the attitude that no criticism of the getting started docs is possible because the product is free. The Draft Getting Started Guide is worse than no documentation because it is inaccurate. It simply wastes peoples' time and detracts from the excellence of Jboss as a whole. Perhaps it could be replaced with a collection of links to some of the other getting started instructions and examples around the net. Thanks to those who have taken the time to publish their knowledge!

As for teaching EJB programming and such, it is correct that JBoss should not necessarily attempt to cover this. But installing and validating the install of the product is specific to JBoss among app servers. Yet there is at least one EJB sample, the template project on the sourceforge site for Jboss. It's far simpler than JPS, but well done.

And yes, the for-pay docs are worth it! Note that AFAIK the paper books available cover the 2.4x versions; for 3.0x you would want the downloadable PDFs/CDs that are available. And buying the docs also supports the project contributors directly, which is another benefit.