Customer Rating: 
Summary: Nice book
Comment: I like Apress books style. This book goes quick to the issues and it's well structured.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Many errors, and APress errata have disappeared
Comment: Seems like a good book when you skim it in the book store. After you buy it and start reading, you realize that (a) there are many errors, and (b) APress (publisher) has "disappeared" the errata from their web site. Nice. I'll be contacting APress about a refund (unfortunately, I write in my tech books :-)
Customer Rating:
Summary: It gets around to it...
Comment: The book is a good summary of the specs and gives a nice introduction to the new things in the world of EJB 3. The section on converting your v2 apps to v3 was particularly useful. Appropriately marked "From Novice to Professional" the book touches on many aspects of the J2EE world in a manner that treats the novice with care and the professional with grace and insight/direction.
On the negative side... The book has a lot of repetition. Many pages are nearly identical (especially the sample building) and could have been condensed and made more useful by sticking to use of Ant and examination of the scripts. The same can be said for the "copy-and-paste nature" of some of the writing. However, one can tack that up to "consistency in writing style."
The book is not what I would call an "easy read," but was informative none-the-less. It serves as a starting point and base reference.
The authors have provided a generally well-rounded book and I would definitely recommend this to others.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Spin up quickly on EJB 3 with ease
Comment: I thoroughly enjoyed reading the "Beginning EJB 3 Application Development" book. (I'm a senior programmer, have been using Java since 1995 and am co-founder and co-leader of the Austin Java Users Group.) The book started off with a nice executive overview of EJB 3 and the usability problems with EJB 2 that it solved.
On a side note, I have been impressed by the EJB 3 working group for making such a bold move forward while remaining backward compatible with the old specification. Typically as a given software technology matures and becomes well established, the software infrastructure and APIs develop a lot of inertia that leads to significant resistance to large improvements. The EJB 3 working group overcame this pressure and produced a bold new elegant design that should be a pleasure to work with. It always takes time and a lot of work to create a clean simple design and I think the team has done that finally with EJB 3.0. The authors captured the advantages of the new specification and leveraged the new capabilities and simplified approaches.
I appreciated the section on setting up the environment and the mechanics of compiling and deploying the EJBs using the free GlassFish application server. Just enough detail of the incantations to work with the server was given in order to get started without getting bogged down in lengthy setup descriptions. The authors provide examples up front to get you quickly up to speed with the new paradigms. They continuously mix clear examples with explanations to ensure that you gain an incremental understanding quickly.
Stateful and stateless session beans are covered. Comparisons are made between annotations and the XML descriptor files and the rules to override are clearly defined. I enjoyed the section on interceptors and was impressed how easy it is with annotations to intervene with preinvoke or postinvoke operations. I liked that the authors are succinct with their explanations. The authors get to the point quickly, which I appreciate given the volumes of material one needs to absorb to keep current in this industry. The examples start off simply and gain complexity as more features of the spec are added to the application. Useful process flow and database schema diagrams typically accompany the examples to clarify the problem.
Early on I found a couple of small bugs in the sample code (mostly caused by a moving specification), but the authors have been very proactive about posting erratas on the website.
JMS and message driven beans are discussed as well. A quick overview of JMS and MDB is given with a succinct, but very relevant status-notification example. The mechanics of setting up a JMS topic and a JavaMail resource is described, as well compiling and deploying the MDB.
There is a nice brief overview of web services and the associated standards. A useful credit card verification example is provided complete with the mechanics of compiling and running the code.
I thought the sections on the Java persistence API were well done. I felt the authors covered most of the typical issues that you run into when mapping Java objects to a relational database schema. Advanced sections covers hierarchical modeling and the advantages of user-defined primary keys for instance. Concrete table definitions and their associated Java mappings are illustrated.
The authors demonstrated that they have solid design experience since they intermingle practical sage advice and admonishments througout the book.
I thought that there should be more advice on forward versus reverse engineering of the database schema since there are a lot of lousy database schemas out there that have been generated directly from the Java object model.
The authors provide a good overview of container versus bean managed transactions. The mechanics of using each approach and the associated trade offs are illustrated. I like that the authors included some of the basic information on transactions such as the definition of ACID for instance. (I need to refresh my memory every so often.)
The performance benchmarking section was very well done. A clearly thought out methodical approach to performance testing is given with what I thought were surprising results between the two mapping approaches (single table inheritance and inheritance through joins). An overview of a very useful load testing tool is given as well. Salient performance comparisons between EJB 2 and 3 are also presented.
For the seasoned EJB 2 folks, there is a chapter on migrating the EJB 2 applications to EJB 3. This chapter may help in understanding what EJB 3 does for you compared to EJB 2 as well.
In summary, the book was definitely worth my time to read. Beginner and advanced programmers will learn from this book. I'd definitely recommend getting the book and I look forward to working with EJB 3 in practice.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Gets you going with EJB 3 ()
Comment: EJB 3 took its time to get mass acceptance, primarily because many Java developers did not have great memories of earlier versions of EJB. EJB 3 is however now gaining momentum and a number of EJB 3 books have hit the market. Beginning EJB 3 is a Beginner - Intermediate level book from Apress.
In their letter to readers, the authors say that "With EJB3, the EJB spec developers had at last settled upon a model that really made sense. Coming from EJB 2.x world, it was like a breath of fresh air.." So EJB 3, is widely believed to be a significant step forward in simplifying enterprise Java development.
The book uses several examples to demonstrate the new found simplicity of EJB 3. The free, open source application server GlassFish, which is the reference implementation for all specifications in Java EE 5 is used in the book.
One of the important changes in EJB 3 was the introduction of annotations. However XML descriptors are still very much around. Java development has a tradition of always taking the most complex approach and if there isn't one, it works at complicating the simple approach. So after the initial excitement about annotations, there's again uncertainty. It's now (Annotations) vs (XML) vs (Annotations & XML mix). On this, the authors say "A simple rule we follow is this - If we need to decouple our entity and bean classes from their EJB 3 metadata, as when we want to use the same entity classes with two different inheritance strategies, we put our metadata in XML. Otherwise, we stick with annotations" "And don't forget...whenever metadata is specified for an element using both XML and annotations, the XML always wins"
Chapter 1 introduces EJB 3 and gives us a quick overview of all that's changed in EJB 3.0. Chapter 2 looks at session beans and dives into using dependency injection in session beans, interceptors, callbacks, local vs remote access even before a session bean example is deployed. So the book kind of works with the assumption that you have tried your hand or as some would say "burnt your fingers" with an earlier version of EJB. The book runs the risk of being too fast for someone who might be trying EJB for the first time.
Chapters 3 and 4 look at entity beans and persistence and Chapter 5 looks at message driven beans. Chapter 6 begins with the basics of Web Services and then moves on to the various web services specs and how you can use the @WebService nd @WebMethod annotations to quickly get your app web services ready.
Chapter 6 to 11 deal with web services, integration, transaction, performance and migration from version 2.1. The good thing about these chapters is that the authors first introduce the concept, the need and the basics and then delve into the actual development. Problems while deploying EJB across applications servers were commonly reported with earlier EJB versions, so it's good that the authors have dedicated a chapter to EJB 3 deployment and planning.
JSF has become more or less the standard for new Java web development. So Chapter 12 is a useful one as it shows EJB client development using a simple JSF + EJB 3 application.
Overall, for a beginner-level book I think it would have been good if there was more content and hand-holding in the initial chapters, as Apress has a book "Pro EJB 3" which could look at the advanced EJB topics in detail. But if you have been on the enterprise Java scene for some time and have tried out EJB earlier, this book will get you going with EJB 3 in no time.
|
|
