Since this is a book for developers by developers, you’ll get the most out of the material covered here by running the examples and experimenting. In this chapter, you’ll make sure that you’ve properly installed the JBoss application server and walk through the steps of setting up the environment and writing a simple application. This is vital to ensuring that you don’t encounter needless frustration as you work through the examples. You’ll also get a taste of the essential steps of creating a Java EE application, what those steps do, and why they’re needed.