JBoss for Administrators

Targeted at Systems Administrators, this course will teach you the in's and out's of running and administering JBoss in a production deployment environment. You will learn how to configure JBoss in both a development and production deployment environment, configure JBoss fundemental services such as JNDI, scheduler, mail service, invokers, and JBoss MQ, and how to correctly package and deploy your services and applications. You will also learn how to use the JMX-Console. The format is 70% theory and 30% labs. This is a 2 day course.

Course Modules

1. JBoss State of the Union
   In this brief introduction we present JBoss.org and JBoss Inc., status of the Open Source project and the current support of API's and the commercial offerings in JBoss Inc.
2. Architecture Overview
   The JBoss 3.0 architectural overview paints the full picture of the app-server microkernel design--the JMX node, MBeans as services and containers. We briefly focus on the containers and then back some more to the unified classloader architecture, before getting to the multiple detached invoker layer and the client proxy tricks.
3. Downloading and Installing JBoss
   The module presents JBoss CVS branches, and explain how to get JBoss source code and compile it. It also shows how to run the testsuite to verify that the version you will use doesn't have bugs. It also shows how to install JBoss binaries.
4. JBoss Configuration - First Steps
   The module introduce the JBoss directory structure and shows you how to define a customized JBoss configuration.
5. JBoss' Services Configuration
   You will learn how to configure the fundamental JBoss services such as JNDI (over JNDI, over HTTP, HA-JNDI auto-discovery), the dynamic class downloading, JBoss Scheduler Service, the mail service, JBoss invokers (RMI over JRMP, RMI over JRMP+SSL, RMI over IIOP, RMI over HTTP), assigning invokers to EJB containers in both JBoss 3.0 and 3.2, JBossWeb network configuration (listeners, HTTPS, logging, sessions) and JBossMQ available invocations layers and persistence managers.
6. Deployment and Packaging
   You will see the packaging types (JAR, SAR, WAR, EAR, etc.) supported by JBoss and see how work un-packed deployments. You will see how to define a service either packaged in a SAR or defined in a standard configuration file and you will also discover JBoss deployment process. You will then be able to define implicit or explicit dependencies between services.
7. Setting a Development Environment
   You will learn how to setup a development environment for your team by either having each developer running its local JBoss instance using a shared JBoss installation (by creating either a single common configuration or multiple remote configuration) or by hosting several instances (one for each developer) on a single central server. You will learn all about the BindingManager service that allows you to concurrently start multiple JBoss instances on a single host
8. NetBoot
   You will learn how to setup and use the JBoss NetBoot feature of JBoss 3.0 as well as the advanced features present in 3.2. Starting a cluster of JBoss instances from one or several web servers will have no more secrets for you after this module.
9. Clustering/Farming
   This chapter shows you how to setup and troubleshoot a clustering configuration. It also shows you the JBoss farming feature that provides the ease of use of the well known /deploy directory for single-node deployment to a whole cluster (/farm directory)
10. JMX-Console
    This module shows you how to secure the jmx-console, and how to use it for several administration task such as cleaning your security and entity beans caches, monitoring your cluster topology, evaluating the contention of your entity beans that use JBoss pessimistic locking and other interesting features.