Thursday, May 24, 2018

Book Review for 'Hands-On Cloud Development with Wildfly'




Hands-On Cloud Development with WildFly Book Cover

This is a nice book that gives a high-level explanation of a multitude of tools used in modern cloud development. 

The book starts with a history of Enterprise Java Development, then turns to Wildfly Swarm.  Swarm is the JBoss equivalent of Spring Boot, allowing developers to choose the Java components required ala carte instead of coming packaged in an all-in-one application server.

The next stop is at Arquillian, which makes unit-testing of Enterprise Java applications practical. 

In all of these cases, the depth of instruction is restrained.  You aren't given enough material to master the topics, just enough to run a working example.  This is good technique for a book that targets a wide tech footprint.

The next chapter introduces cloud computing and Red Hat's OpenShift container operating framework.  This chapter covers a lot of territory, introducing  hot topics like Docker and Kubernetes along the way.  If you aren't yet caught up in cloud development, this chapter will be very valuable for you.

The next few chapters cover some necessary topics for cloud computing, namely storage and networking.  Invaluable also.

The book next moves on to Jenkins, token-based security (as used in cloud solutions) and some application development sugar (in the form of Hystrix.  At the time of this review, Hystrix is under assailment from other tools and looks like it may not be the long-term winner.)

The final chapter makes some predictions about possible future directions.

All things considered, this is a book with a very ambitious tech footprint.  It does a pretty good job of covering all of the above (some pretty important topics) while giving the reader a fair amount of hands-on practical experience.

For coders on the front-side of the cloud computing slope, I'd recommend this book.  It's a shortcut to contemporary development knowledge.




The book can be found here and here.

Happy coding!

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