Review: "Java EE 7 Performance Tuning and Optimization" by Osama Oransa

Markus Eisele
0
Latest Packt Publishing Java EE 7 books are all around performance and tuning. I had the pleasure to review another book, the  "Java EE 7 Performance Tuning and Optimization" by Osama Oransa.

Abstract
With the expansion of online enterprise services, the performance of an enterprise application has become a critical issue. Even the smallest change to service availability can severely impact customer satisfaction, which can cause the enterprise to incur huge losses. Performance tuning is a challenging topic that focuses on resolving tough performance issues.
In this book, you will explore the art of performance tuning from all perspectives using a variety of common tools, while studying many examples.
This book covers performance tuning in Java enterprise applications and their optimization in a simple, step-by-step manner. Beginning with the essential concepts of Java, the book covers performance tuning as an art. It then gives you an overview of performance testing and different monitoring tools. It also includes examples of using plenty of tools, both free and paid.

Book: "Java EE 7 Performance Tuning and Optimization"
Language : English
Paperback: 478 pages
Release Date: June 23, 2014
ISBN-10: 178217642X
ISBN-13: 978-1782176428

About the Author
Osama Oransa (blog) is an IT solution architect with more than 12 years of technical experience in Java EE. He is a certified Java enterprise architect and an SME in web services technology. He is currently working with the Vodafone Group as a solution architect. He has a diploma in IT from the Information Technology Institute (ITI) and a diploma in CS from the Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport (AASTM). He is currently working towards a Master's degree in CS. In 2010, one of his projects in Pulse Corp, "Health Intact", won Oracle Duke's Choice Award. He is the founder of more than 12 open source projects hosted on SourceForge.

The Content
Chapter 1, Getting Started with Performance Tuning, takes you through the art of performance tuning with its different components and shows you how to think when we face any performance issue. It focuses on preparing you to deal with the world of performance tuning and defining the handling tactics.
Chapter 2, Understanding Java Fundamentals, lays the foundation of required knowledge of the new features in Java Enterprise Edition 7 and different important Java concepts, including the JVM memory structure and Java concurrency. It also focuses on the different Java Enterprise Edition concurrency capabilities.
Chapter 3, Getting Familiar with Performance Testing, discusses performance testing with its different components, defines useful terminologies that you need to be aware of, and then gives hands-on information about using Apache JMeter to create your performance test plans for different components and get the results.
Chapter 4, Monitoring Java Applications, dissects the different monitoring tools that will be used in performance tuning, starting from the operating system tools, different IDE tools, JDK tools, and standalone tools. It covers JProfiler as an advanced profiling tool with its offline profiling capabilities.
Chapter 5, Recognizing Common Performance Issues, discusses the most common performance issues, classifies them, describes the symptoms, and analyzes the possible root causes.
Chapter 6, CPU Time Profiling, focuses on the details of getting the CPU and time profiling results, ways to interpret the results, and ways to handle such issues. It discusses the application logic performance and ways to evaluate different application logics. It provides the initial performance fixing strategy.
Chapter 7, Thread Profiling, discusses thread profiling with details on how to read and interpret thread profiling results and how to handle threading issues. It also highlights the ways to get, use, and read the thread dumps.
Chapter 8, Memory Profiling, discusses how to perform memory profiling, how to read and interpret the results, and how to identify and handle possible issues. It also shows how to read and query memory heap dumps and analyze the different out of memory root causes. The chapter finishes your draft performance fixing strategy.
Chapter 9, Tuning an Application's Environment, focuses on tuning the application environment, starting from the JVM and passing through other elements such as the application servers, web servers, and OS. We will focus on selected examples for each layer and discuss the best practices for tuning them.
Chapter 10, Designing High-performance Enterprise Applications, discusses design and architecture decisions and the performance impact. This includes SOA, REST, cloud, and data caching. It also discusses the performance anti-patterns.
Chapter 11, Performance Tuning Tips, highlights the performance considerations when using the Agile or Test-driven Development methodologies. This chapter also discusses some performance tuning tips that are essential during the designing and development stages of the Java EE applications, including database interaction, logging, exception handling, dealing with Java collections, and others. The chapter also discusses the javap tool that will help you to understand the compiled code in a better way.
Chapter 12, Tuning a Sample Application, includes hands-on, step-by-step tuning of a sample application that has some performance issues. We will measure the application performance and tune the application issues, and re-evaluate the application performance.

Writing and Style
The language is clear and easy to follow. Illustrations and tables makes understanding of the written word easier. Even a non native speaker can follow easily.

Conclusion and Recommendation
80 percent of the book cover general performance tuning, monitoring and profiling. Only the last three chapters cover additional information for enterprisy applications. The sample application walk through is kind of helpful and gives beginners a decent idea at what to look if you have never done that kind of things before. The title is highly confusing and I would have picked a more general name. This book is not intended to cover Java EE features; it simply highlights some essential fundamentals we should be aware of while dealing with Java performance tuning and applies more general to Java SE based applications.

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