Customer Reviews

Beginning Database-Driven Application Development in Java EE: Using GlassFish (Expert's Voice in Open Source)

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We needed to bootstrap ourselves into the J2EE world, and were already using NetBeans for other small tasks. Our project was simple enough, but we needed a high quality message queueing system, so we decided to look into JMS. This boot brought us through enough development to have a working 3-tier application with a data publisher, a transformation object connected to a database, and a graphical data consumer application ready to go in just 6 days.

The other reviewers are correct that it puts a lot of pages into JPA and then rushes through the remaining topics, but it's just enough to get you started on the right terminology and looking for web references that will fill out the particular piece you're scratching your head over. Ideally, we'd love to see an advanced companion to this book that would explain things like how to get queue connection factories to default to clear text on connection, an ongoing puzzler for us, but this book certainly helped us achieve this remarkably fast entry to J2EE programming.

At 400 pages, I thought this book would cover more aspects of using Glassfish and Java EE 5. However, the first chapter covers quickly Glassfish setup and then it moves on to covering JPA, in fact the first twevle chapters cover, setting up a database, JPA, Entity Beans, JPQL, and ORM. The last couple of chapters are a rush through the rest of Java EE.

If you are just starting Java EE programming, this is a good starting point for learning the database side of Java EE. There just isn't much more than that. I was really hoping that JSF would be covered more in this book.

While the layout of the book is sporadic and jumps around a bit, the content walks you carefully through getting up and running on Glassfish, including an good introduction to J2EE Web Applications. The first couple of chapters walk you through downloading and installing / configuring mySQL and the Oracle Database XE (Express Edition). It then eventually moves on toward database specific issues and design considerations, and has a lot of information on Java Persistence API and EJB.

This book has been my 'main' book in the early study of Sun's Application Server and J2EE. Certainly if you are learning J2EE, EJB, and Glassfish you should have a 2-3 books on the topics, but I would highly recommend this book as part of that suite.

The theory in the book on Java persistence is good, however the examples are incomplete and even the downloaded source from the publishers web site does not work. I am pretty sure this book was first to market as a Glassfish resource ... I wish I'd waited for a book which was better thought out.