APACHE KARAF COOKBOOK: Over 60 recipes to help you get the most out of your Apache Karaf deployments

Good introductory book

I wish the book had been written three years ago, when I just started working with Apache Camel, Karaf, Servicemix, and other open source integration frameworks.The book is full of useful recipes, which you can use as a cheat sheet to use a very broad range of integration techniques. You can find out how to deploy Apache CXF based web services (both REST and SOAP), routes with Apache Camel, and an Apache ActiveMQ broker. The book not only explains how to deploy an application, based on a specific technology, but also gives a brief introduction to this technology (e.g., Apache Camel, Apache CXF). Are you familiar with Hadoop, Cassandra, and big data? The book describes how you can deploy a Cassandra or Hadoop client to Karaf and leverage from OSGi. Do you want to customize Apache Karaf itself? The first chapter is dedicated to the creation of your own commands in Apache Karaf.The book also explains different deployment modes: OSGi bundles, features, and KAR (Karaf Archives). Is you jar file not an OSGi bundle? You can find an answer about how to deploy it to Karaf too.All the recipes are accompanied by good and detailed coding examples.Of course, you can find certain errors in the command spelling, but you can easily find a correct version by "googling" or by using any other search engine.I would recommend this book for everyone, who wants to expand and to make deeper their knowledge with Apache Karaf and how it can be used to deploy an integration route, a web service, or an embedded web server. Of course, if you really want to go deeper, I would recommend "Learning Apache Karaf" by Johan Edstrom et al., published by Packt.

The Apache Karaf Cookbook set out to help system administrators and developers learn how to implement Karaf in a production environment. This is a much needed value in every enterprise where karaf can be implemented. No organization will just download the Karaf code and implement it as-is in production. So, how did the Apache Karaf Cookbook do? The first four chapters raised very important issues relevant in the production environment and provided some useful ingredients to those issues except when it comes to customizing the logo. The book does not provide adequate explanation or demonstrate how you can generate your own ASCII text character for your logo. It just directs you to the code with already generated ASCII text and Jansi character . I went online and generated my own ASCII Text Jansi character into branding.properties text file. When I started Karaf, it just distorted the character and it was not recognizable. It was an ugly mess. It did not work. After trying several times to make it work without success, I moved on with my reading.Chapter two is very helpful for anyone who has read Camel in Action. It helps to learn how to implement Camel route in a Karaf environment. Chapter three is also very useful for incorporating ActiveMQ in a Karaf environment. The book provided many helpful ingredients about how you can use Karaf to implement a lot of useful solutions in your organization ranging from implementing the Pax web to implementing web services using Apache CXF, however, it failed in my judgment, in the most critical area in production- Security integration with enterprise security infrastructure.First, every organization has at least one or more enterprise identity management system and authentication providers such as Active Directory, LDAP, SAML, CA SiteMinder, Oracle's OID, or even home-grown, etc. These security systems provide interfaces for enterprise integration with applications security implementation, therefore, for a system such as Karaf to be implemented in production, it must also integrate with any of these authentication providers.Karaf Cookbook failed to even demonstrate how LDAP can be integrated to provide authentication for Karaf and application bundles you deploy under Karaf.The book discussed configuring security for a web application in Karaf where Java Authentication and Authorization Service (JAAS) is discussed but the examples provided were based only on user.properties file. Even in using user.properties file in a web application, the book failed to demonstrate how custom user entitlements can be implemented using the roles in user.properties. In other words, it needed to show how you can use your own organization's roles and groups to inherit the properties of the parent roles in the user.properties. For example, if you have admin and manager roles in user.properties file, in your application you can define custom roles such as ACME_admin or ACME_manager. These roles will inherit the properties of their respective parent roles in user.properties file. Then in the application you just focus on assigning different levels of privileges to the ACME_admin and ACME_manager roles and other custom groups or roles you need based on your business requirements then at runtime application users can assign users to these custom roles and groups. This provides flexibility in driving user entitlements in the application. In this construct, application users can assign users from any authentication provider that is integrated with Karaf.I know there is a discussion of how to implement LDAP and other authentication providers in the Apache Karaf Security framework document. The document does not provide adequate information that can help a busy system administrator or a developer to be productive quickly. That's why books like the Karaf Cookbook should address these security implementations so that helps folks like me be productive quickly or at least helps us to implement solutions for a quick POC for our organizations before we request outside Karaf consultants to come on site to help us review and audit our systems before production implementation.The book also failed to demonstrate how you can integrate Karaf and SMTP server. In todays enterprise environment, no system stands alone. For Karaf to be accepted in the enterprise, there must be a good narrative about how to accomplish enterprise security and collaboration integrations.The book spent a lot of time addressing concepts other books have already addressed such as Karaf Celler. There is a book for that already, it is called Learning Karaf Celler. I wish, it focused on its core mission which is making Karaf production ready by addressing the most important thing in production- Security integration.Overall, I give the book three stars for thinking about the need for productionizing Karaf. This is a good effort. I am looking forward to more efforts in the area of SMTP and security integration.

Das Buch ist von einem der Committer des Karaf. Leider macht sich das dadurch bemerkbar dass der Autor von einem sehr tiefen Wissen ausgeht und es nicht schafft die Beispiele nachvollziehbar zu beschreiben.Das passt auch zur offiziellen Dokumentation z.B. des pax-jdbc Projektes welches extrem minimalistisch ist.Fazit: Wer dieses Buch versteht, braucht es nicht, wer dieses Buch nicht versteht hat Pech.