Blue, Part 1 of the Red, White and Blue Technology Trilogy Why I love EJBs, an Introduction to Modern Java Middleware is a very good read.
I have recently finished the 2 books by Marc Fleury, Jmx: Managing J2ee Applications with Java Management Extensions and JBoss Administration and Development and have a deep respect for the JBoss team and Marc's ability to explain their architecture.
James Strachan does a good analysis and summary (+ his personal opinion) of the document at Why Marc loves EJBs
I'll just quote some of my favorite parts, that are not only related to the technology.
What I like most in this document is the mix of personal history, feelings, and technical insight, argumented with passion: programming today is still more a craft than an industry, where strong personnalities can make a huge difference. This is one of the aspects that draw me to this discipline.
First of all I must admit that I love EJBs. I am also a closet MicroSoft Windows lover, so my love for simple technology is cross-boundaries.
I use Windows 2000 as my development platform, and I liked what I've read about .NET. But I consider switching to a Mac :-)
The new persistence framework, specified in EJB 2.0 is so powerful it should really be a stand-alone spec. We will talk more about that in the RED paper.
I look forward to read the following papers. I liked the double allusion to France's national colors and Kieslowski's excellent trilogy in the paper's title.
I remember the economics of a standard drawing by Shel Finkelstein, Sun’s marketing manager for J2EE, and the clear mathematical explanation of why natural monopolies emerge in integration industries. I use this picture all the time today. I remember that mostly I didn’t really know what I was talking about, but that was alright, because neither did they, no-one did, no one could, these were the days of the beginning, of server-side java and the 1999 gold rush, we were all running wild, everything had to be built and we had a virgin field.
I was as excited as a 3 year old in a candy store. My wife and I were expecting our first child. I left Sun to earn three times as much money as a contractor, but soon came to the realization that I was still using my head to build someone else’s product. I remember stopping at a traffic light in the Silicon Valley, being pissed off, and thinking that I would start my own EJB container.
I need to find out about this presentation if this guy is still at Sun. I remember these gold rush years very vividly: I was at Netscape Netcenter then and pushed for the adoption of Java on the server side for our personalization engine. I think it's still in C++. I did not have my "traffic light" moment yet: I'm still building someone else's product :-(
I remember meeting the WebLogic founders in ‘98 when they asked me “Is Sun the same f***ed up company it’s always been?” I remember coining the “He who owns the transactional Web, owns the Web” sentence and presenting it to Ali Kutay, the then CEO of WebLogic, while I was applying for a job. I remember thinking, when Ali jotting down the sentence, “hum, that one hit home.” I then remember my surprise when I read a quote from Esther Dyson, a recognized industry pundit, quoting that exact same phrase. A couple of weeks later BEA (the transactional giant) was acquiring WebLogic. “He who owns the transactional web…” was becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. When BEA told me the news that they couldn’t offer me a job there as they froze hiring, it later motivated me to create JBoss. Incidentally, BEA unsuccessfully tried several times to hire Rickard Oberg, who gave us the JBoss 2.X codebase, which could have been WebLogic…my brain goes in recursive loops at this point, I find it spooky, something to ponder over a good glass of wine.
Excellent anecdote, proving that being a technical visionary is not enough to make a big splash. This reminds me the conversation between Cedric and Russel about the search for the killer app.
That interceptor isn’t tied to EJB. In fact, ANY java method call (EJB or not) that declares the right transactional tags can be outfitted with the transactional EJB-like interceptor and corresponding service and thus expose the same semantics and transactional flow control as the straight EJBs. This is the beauty of AOP assembly taken as a lesson from EJB.
It is my understanding that C# the language from .NET does exactly the same, meaning that you can declare in the body of the code itself. Security behaves in just the same way. We add an interceptor that enables us to control the access patterns.
With their JMX and interceptors based architecture JBoss lets you do AOP today without a specific compiler or bytecode level manipulations. This is an interesting way of countering C#'s language advances with java that does not evolve much anymore. A pragmatic alternative to end the sterile argument that happened recently in blogland about Java's too slow evolution.
Real Tech Before Spec. Give it a try, the plain vanilla EJB that is. Come to one of our trainings and learn exactly how to use and tune all the parts, even modify interceptors for your own benefit. Everyone does it, it is simpler than it sounds. In fact, everyone usually finishes the lab on client side interceptors in less than 30 minutes. You will find its simplicity refreshing. You will become a container developer before you know it.
Oh and remember we love you, soon, you will all be walking through walls, not just me, everyone.
Real Tech Before Spec, a good motto, showing the kind of pragmatism that Sam Ruby practices.
This makes me want to spend a little time playing with JBoss: I've spent the past 10 months playing with Weblogic, Websphere and SUN ONE app servers. I'd also like to walk through walls with these guys !
The document ends with a touching picture of Marc sleeping with his babies on his belly: good job man, you deserve some good sleep !
6:49:42 PM Google It! 
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