As I had mentioned few weeks back that I was sent Tomcat 6 Developer’s Guide from Packt Publishing for review and what else I had loved to read. Personally I have been working on Apache Tomcat and its different flavors including Liferay Portal Server throughout my professional career. It was a fun ride reading the things which go behind the Apache Tomcat Development and recalling few things which I already knew.

This book is very well organized by the author Damodar Chetty specially when it is first of its kind on this subject. A really big help to the developers to understand the Tomcat’s internal functionality in right manner. Book starts with the introduction to the Tomcat, history behind it, brief about its functioning process, components, the installation & configuration of Tomcat plus the setting up of Tomcat development environment with development tools. This book used Eclipse as IDE and MySQL as database for the illustration of development environment. Then it proceeds with making you understand the basics of Servlets, JEE architecture, API and components, Tomcat Servlet Container & Components, lifecycle of Tomcat components and its startup process.

After providing the high-level implementation in starting chapters, all the architectural components are torn apart one after other in later chapters with appropriate coding snippets. Book dwells into every component so beautifully that the overlapping between one functionality to other is almost transparent even when all components make altogether different chapters in book. Concepts like Tomcat virtual hosts, URLs and protocol handlers, Context initialization and Startup and Session security, which are generally not very clear to even advanced developers, are explained very well by the author. Although some of the core concepts are just touched or not covered like Realm, SSI, MBeans, Load Balancers but still this book facilitate proper understanding of basic functionality of Tomcat as that being the primary objective, above mentioned components constitute to advanced Tomcat topics which can be expected to be covered in future.

As the different components are explained in different subdivisions of book with appropriate references to their connection with related components in other chapters, this book turns out to be more of a continuous study guide than a reference guide. So it is suggested to read this book thoroughly especially when it is written in that way.

Personally I feel that this book is equally good for J2EE architects/advanced developers and administrators. Basically this book is written for progressive Java programmers and beauty of this book lies in holding the subject with that particular group in focus.

Throughout the book, code examples and flow diagrams are provided where the theory starts becoming complex. This makes it easier to understand the implementation by running the code itself than just grasping the concept. Also different Tips and Tricks spread throughout the book serve as useful notes for alternate scenarios and options available.

Recently I have been contacted by Amit Sharma, Marketing Research Executive from Packt Publishing asking if I will be interested in reviewing their recently published a book titled Tomcat 6 Developer’s Guide. For me, it is just like reviewing something you are very much in and of course, you can’t refuse such an offer when you already consider yourself as kinda subject matter expert in that technology. Therefore, though shamelessly, I have agreed and ordered complimentary e-copy of this book.

From Subject Matter Expert, I got reminded of congratulating my roomie Pankaj Kumar Bhardwaj (you have been knowing him as Chunks on this blog) on his new job at AmDocs as Senior Subject Matter Expert (he himself is still not sure what Subject word stands for in his designation!).

Something about Packt Publishing – as I have come to know about this publishing house, it is in operation from year 2004 and has been publishing books on versatile IT topics including various systems, applications, and frameworks. Also they are doing good job in supporting and funding Open Source projects by paying royalty from the sale money of the books on corresponding projects.

About book, Tomcat 6 Developer’s Guide begins by providing detailed instructions on building a Tomcat distribution. It introduces readers to the conceptual underpinnings of web servers, the Java EE and servlet specifications, and the Tomcat container. Key Tomcat components and the internal workings of each component are explained in detail in this book. Tomcat installation, stepping into key Tomcat components, as well as into your own custom servlets are illustrated with the help of examples.

Some of the key topics covered are -

• Take your Java EE web programming skills to the next level by getting an expert’s level understanding of the servlet specification and its reference implementation, Apache Tomcat.
• Build a Tomcat distribution from its source code, and explore the components, classes, and technologies that make up this container.
• Use standard development tools such as Eclipse, Ant, and Subversion to dissect a Tomcat distribution.
• Discover the touch points between the servlet specification and a servlet container’s implementation.
• Acquire specialist grade skills in a range of technologies that contribute to Java server side development

So fellas, hopefully you can expect a review from yours truly on this book as soon as I complete reading it.