Introduction

Apache Geronimo is the first Open Source Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) 1.4 certified application server released under the liberal Apache 2.0 License. The availability of a production-grade J2EE server to the general public free of charge, and free of technical or financial obligations, is unprecedented. Geronimo is a robust server that is well supported by a large global community of users and developers.

As a full-featured J2EE server, Geronimo can host a variety of server applications, including those created using servlets, Java Server Pages (JSPs), Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs), and Message Driven Beans (MDBs). In addition, Geronimo provides valuable container services, including naming/lookup, security, management, and transaction. Geronimo also comes out of the box with a relational database server and a message queue broker. You can immediately deploy your enterprise application to Geronimo.

Getting started with such a comprehensive server can be a daunting undertaking. This book is written to make this easy. Whether you have been using a commercial J2EE server, or this is your first encounter with an application server, this book should make your exploration and implementation as smooth and painless as possible.

Who This Book is For

This book is ideal for those considering Geronimo for possible production deployment within their organizations. Those who had already decided on Geronimo, and want the most rapid ramp-up possible to kick-start the implementation process, will find great value here. Whether you are a manager looking for information to aid in your decision making, a system administrator looking for deployment and configuration information, or a developer evaluating Geronimo for in-house testing and/or production development, you will find that this book provides an effective one-stop shop for your Geronimo needs.

Managers will benefit from the conceptual and architectural coverage that familiarizes you with how things work in Geronimo. Limitations and deployment considerations are cited where applicable to provide a feel of what Geronimo can really do for you in your environment.

Administrators will find the hands-on deployment and configuration examples useful. A cookbook approach covers all the target modules and packages that you may want to deploy to a Geronimo server, including download, installation, configuration, deployment, as well as server management and maintenance-all aspects of Geronimo.

Developers will find the organization of the book clean and concise enough to dive into applicable sections to quickly extract usable information. Written by hardcore developers who wrote some of the actual Geronimo code, the authors understand the needs of developers, and the coverage in this book reflects it. Chapters and sections on application troubleshooting, the chapter on Geronimo’s “secret” debug console, and jconsole integration are just a short list of examples of the hardcore coverage that this book provides.