Organization of the Book

Mastering BEA WebLogic Server is organized around three key themes:

• Walking you through the design, construction, and deployment of a realistic example application

• Discussing advanced topics and best practices in areas such as administration, performance tuning, and configuration of WebLogic Server environments

• Providing you with best practices for developing and deploying your own WebLogic Server applications

The first 10 chapters focus on the first theme, and the next 4 target the second theme; best practices are a focus throughout the entire book. Here is a brief description of each chapter to help you understand the scope and organization of the book:

Chapter 1 reviews key Web application concepts and technologies and then discusses advanced topics such as response caching, custom tags, and servlet filtering.

Chapter 2 examines the presentation- tier requirements that drive Web application architectures, compares JSP-centric and servlet-centric architectures, and makes specific recommendations to help you choose an appropriate architecture for your WebLogic Server application.

Chapter 3 details the design of the presentation-tier layer of a fairly large and complex J2EE application. Topics include alternative page-assembly techniques, business-tier interfaces, and the requirements of the example application that lead to the chosen design.

Chapter 4 walks through the construction of the Struts- and JSP-based example Web application. Construction techniques unique to WebLogic Server are emphasized along with the components and techniques resulting from the choice of presentation approach, Web application architecture, and business-tier interaction techniques.

Chapter 5 discusses the steps required to package and deploy a WebLogic Server Web application with an emphasis on WebLogic-specific techniques and best practices.

Chapter 6 examines options and best practices related to the implementation of Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) technology in WebLogic Server 8.1. After a brief review of EJB technology and the WebLogic Server EJB container, the chapter presents WebLogic-specific features and capabilities and explains how best to leverage them in your development efforts.

Chapter 7 walks through the design and construction of the business tier of the example application, highlighting key concepts and best practices. Candidate business-tier architectures are identified and examined in light of a representative set of business-tier requirements, construction options for EJB components are compared, and selected business-tier components in the example application are examined to highlight implementation details and best practices.

Chapter 8 discusses the steps required to package and deploy WebLogic Server EJB applications in a development environment. The basic structures of EJB and enterprise applications are reviewed, Ant-based build processes are presented, options for packaging applications are compared, and deployment techniques for WebLogic Server development environments are examined.

Chapter 9 presents information and best practices related to the WebLogic Server JMS implementation. Topics include JMS clustering, quotas, flow control, transactions, application design, asynchronous consumers, and foreign providers.

Chapter 10 covers important topics related to WebLogic Server Security, including details on the WebLogic Security Framework and available security providers. This chapter also presents techniques for configuring secure clients and servers, setting up secure server-to-server communication, and managing application security using WebLogic Security features.

Chapter 11 focuses on WebLogic Server administration and the architecture of the WebLogic Server product. This is not a users guide to the administration console, but rather an in-depth look at the internal architecture of WebLogic Server, a discussion of important administrative concepts such as server health states and network channels, and a thorough treatment of the configuration, monitoring, and management of WebLogic Server and WebLogic Server-based applications.

Chapter 12 presents best practices for delivering and troubleshooting scalable high-performance systems. It includes a discussion of core principles and strategies for scalable J2EE systems, a collection of important design patterns and best practices that affect performance and scalability, and steps and techniques you can use to improve performance and solve scalability issues in your systems.

Chapter 13 rounds out the discussion of development-related best practices with recommendations in key areas related to the development environment. Topics include development-environment hardware and software, organizing your project directory structure, establishing a build process, choosing appropriate development tools, and creating a unit-testing infrastructure for your project.

Chapter 14 discusses strategies and best practices for deploying Weblogic Server applications in a production environment, focusing on production deployment strategies, global traffic-management solutions, and production-security best practices.

Chapter 15 reviews Web Services technology, describes WebLogic Server s Web Services support, and presents best practices related to Web Services. Example Web Services are created using WebLogic Server utilities, advanced Web Services features in WebLogic Server are discussed, and a Web Service is built to interface with the primary example program in the book.

Chapters 1 through 10 cover key development-related topics such as Web application design and development, EJB design and development, JMS, and security. Numerous best practices are presented in these chapters as topics and options are presented and explained. You should probably read these chapters in order as they also track the design and development of the example application and build on each other to some extent.

Chapters 11 through 15 cover best practices related to administration, deployment, performance tuning, environment configuration, and Web Services development. These chapters tend to be less dependent on earlier chapters and can be read independently if the topics are of interest.