Interview : Masoud Kalali, author of GlassFish Security

Masoud Kalali is the author of GlassFish Security book which helps you secure your GlassFish installation, Web applications, EJB applications, Application Client modules, and Web services.

Masoud has a software engineering degree and has been working on software development projects since 1998. He has experience with a variety of technologies (.NET, J2EE, CORBA, and COM+) on diverse platforms (Solaris, Linux, and Windows) in software architecture, software system design, and server-side development. He is interested in high output large scale software systems.

He has written several articles on Java.net and Dzone. He has authored multiple refcards, published by Dzone, including Using XML in Java, Berkeley DB Java Edition, Java EE Security and GlassFish v3.

He is one of the founder members of NetBeans Dream Team and a GlassFish community spotlighted developer.

Masoud blogs on Java EE, Software Architecture and Security at http://kalali.me. You can follow him at http://twitter.com/MasoudKalali

Packt: Your book is published now. How is the feeling of being a published author?

Masoud: Well, writing a book is a hard and time consuming process especially when the book covers some less discussed topics like software security. When I received the email telling me that my book is now available in print, I got very excited. I am very happy to see the readers liking the book and posting positive reviews. These positive reviews make me happy as I realize that the readers also find the book useful.

Packt: What benefits did writing a book bring to your specialist area?

Masoud: First of all, I think the benefit of writing a book is like discovering some features and functionalities which the author had less or no knowledge about. When we do our job, we are using what we know without extensive research in new and cutting edge features, but when we author a book, we dig deeper into the subject to ensure that we are getting our readers all options and information fitting the book’s context and it naturally increase our effectiveness at work.

Packt: Our authors usually have full-time jobs whilst writing for us. Was this the case for you and how did you approach managing your time?

Masoud: I spent most of my weekends working on the book but not all of them. I used some afternoon and night time as well to meet the schedule and finish the chapters and reviews on-time. Looking at the authoring task from above we will see that a fair deal of effort is required to complete a book and keep up researches, daily job, and community contributions going normally. The GlassFish Security book took about a year from day we signed the contract to the publishing date. The major workload was authoring the first drafts of the chapters. After the first draft is finished all the time required for that specific chapter is like ¼ of the time spent in developing the first draft of the chapter.

Packt: Whilst writing your book, did you find that it overshadowed personal life in any way? How did you deal with this?

Masoud: Well, it is an art to continue working on a book and keep the daily life going as it was before starting the book. Knowing a subject is very different from authoring a book on that subject while you have a daily job to attend to. The only time that I felt the book project affected my daily life was the last stage of the book completion when we started approving the final drafts for printing. The schedule was very tight and some other obstacles were affecting a good team work.

Other than that, no other time I felt the book authoring process is affecting my life in a non-cope able way.

Packt: Do you have any advice for other authors who may be interested in writing for Packt, but are still unsure?

Masoud: I had an experience with another publisher and saw some differences between how Packt book development procedure works and how others handle the book development task. At first, I felt that Packt's way is less friendlier compared to another publisher but later on I found that the Packt’s way of dealing with editor reviews, comment addressing,… was as effective and friendly as one can expect it to be. My advice to the authors, choose a topic you know by heart, do not propose an aggressive schedule nor accept such schedule because it is hard to develop more than one chapter per month, if you got a daily job. If you are a development community member, a blogger, and a contributor to open source projects it will be even harder to finish a chapter in one month.

Packt: Do you have any tips for other authors, or tricks that you learnt whilst writing, that you'd like to share?

Masoud: Start with the big picture of the chapter and then fill in the blanks, never start writing without having a grand plan for the chapter. Write down all headings down to level 3 and then incorporate the contents for each heading.

Draw your complex diagrams yourself and leave the easier ones for the artists because it is you who knows how to draw the diagram to convey the message and not the artists. Changing an arrow thickness can change the understanding curve of a diagram and it is what you would know better as an expert.

Comments, comments, and comments….put comments everywhere you want to remind yourself of something missing or something required to be added. You may want to include a section, an image address, a link, a tip,… but you cannot do it before you finish another chapter or another section of the book. Place a comment in the document file in order not to forget it. You can ask your editor to leave the comments addressing yourself intact so you use them to remember what you were going to do.

Packt: How did you find the overall experience of writing your book for Packt?

Masoud: Well, everything goes as smooth as I expected until we finished the final draft and start preparing the PDF files for printer. The road was a little bumpy after that because of the tight schedule and some technical issues due to Packt’s website redesign…. But I think it was the case during that specific period of time and not something happening always.

Packt: During the writing process, did you come across any issues/ difficulties that affected your writing and how did you overcome these?

Masoud: Unexpected big issues with customer can affect the whole writing process because when one is assigned to deal with an architectural issue of customer software system he cannot think about anything else.

Traveling and attending conferences can affect the whole writing process specially the schedule which is the second most important thing after the content quality.

The only way to deal with these events is to double the work for some two or three weeks to keep up with the schedule.

Packt: Was there anything interesting that happened during the writing of the book?

Masoud: Well, I am not good with understanding which gender a name is used for and on few occasions I addressed one of the ladies involved with the book project as a he.

Packt: How did Packt’s Acquisition Editors help you - what kind of things did they help you with and how did they support you throughout the writing process?

Masoud: I liked the way they communicated and helped me with my questions about styling, schedule, TOC, etc. I appreciate my editor’s help on my project.

Packt: What projects, if any, are you working on at the moment?

Masoud: I am working with a customer on Hadoop, GlassFish, MySQL centric project which is due to be finished soon.

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