Appendix E. Installing and configuring the Java EE 5 SDK
Throughout the book, we evaded the topic of installing application servers and configuring our sample application inside an installed server. We avoided this subject for two reasons. First, this book is about the EJB 3 standard and we didn’t want to slant this book toward a specific application-server implementation. Second, providing application-server-specific instructions is a tricky business at best. This is because application-server implementations change quite often, making instructions out of date. This is especially true for a potentially long-lived technology like EJB 3.
However, we don’t want to leave you completely high and dry, even if it means providing instructions that may not be up-to-date when you read this. You should treat the material in this appendix as a general guideline more than anything else. We’ll provide the basic instructions for installing and configuring the ActionBazaar application using the Java EE SDK based on the GlassFish application server, which seems like an obvious choice since it’s the “official” reference implementation for Java EE 5. Note that in no sense do we endorse GlassFish as something you should be using for anything other than the purposes of learning EJB 3 with this book.