J2EE has given way to Java EE, and this book provides great coverage not only of GlassFish but of Java EE 5 APIs as well.

J2EE is dead! Long live Java EE! (A Java enterprise specification by any other name...) Over the past couple of years, Sun decided to abandon the "2" in their Java acronyms. So J2SE is now simply Java Standard Edition (SE), and J2EE is now Java EE. This change became official for Enterprise Java in the transition between J2EE 1.4 and Java EE 5.

The GlassFish Application Server is the product of Project GlassFish, an effort led by Sun to build a reference implementation for the Java EE 5 specification. David Heffelfinger's book, Java EE 5 Development Using GlassFish Application Server, is much more than a book about installing, configuring, and running GlassFish. Its methodical point-by-point coverage of the critical APIs that are part of the Java EE 5 spec goes beyond talking just about GlassFish, enters the realm of broader-scoped books on Java EE 5, the ones with titles that include words like "Bible" or "All-In-One Reference".

Online reviews for the book have complained that it doesn't focus enough on GlassFish particulars and veers into talk about the Java EE 5 APIs. But from my perspective that's a positive, not a negative. The book has proved very useful to me in examining both GlassFish and Java EE 5. After considering GlassFish as the platform of choice for the sample application in the second edition of our book, Web Application Architecture: Principles, Protocols, & Practices, we decided to use Tomcat 5.5 instead, given the somewhat slow acceptance of Java EE 5 in the development community. At my day job, we're actively using JBoss 4.2, which invites the usage of Java EE 5 technologies including EJB3 and JPA. I found this book to be a great reference not just for GlassFish, but for Java EE 5 in general. True, the chapters are relatively brief and don't go into gory detail about each API, but this is just what you want if you are just beginning to explore them. The examples are simple but effective in conveying general information about how each API is intended to be used. Those "Bible" books are hard to tote around and sift through to find what you're looking for, but these chapters are excellent concise guides to the Java EE 5 APIs. I highly recommend this book to developers trying to get their heads around the pieces of Java EE 5 and make sense of them.