The book aims to achieve three ideal goals for server side application development; zero development, zero deployment and zero administration. They aim at developing new features or additions without requiring additional programming, introducing new versions to clients without disturbing them and the idea that systems run automatically without human intervention.

The three goals are worth considering when developing applications and the book contains 17 chapters which all aim to achieve partially one of the three goals. The book starts by describing Classloaders and how they can be used to achieve on-the-fly code upgrades. The book continues with extensions (the fact that you can load modules without changing the CLASSPATH) and threads. Halfway through the book I found some of the issues and ideas a bit too general and too simplistic to offer me any real advice for server-side application development. Which chapters one finds too general however, will depend on the background of the reader. The final chapters are more interesting; they cover remote control, middleware and how to monitor applications.

The book is written in a narrative style explaining the development of a Generic Java Application Server. The principles are illustrated with bits of Java code and references to design patterns. The book does not explain any API, it tries to give ideas which you should further develop in your own server-side development. Some important topics are not covered though, e.g. security and profiling and resource management.