Beginning Java Google App Engine [Paperback]

Kyle Roche (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 143022553X | ISBN-13: 978-1430225539 | Publication Date: December 17, 2009 | Edition: 1st Edition.

Google App Engine is one of the key technologies to emerge in recent years to help developers build web applications. A great number of the developers approach the App Engine are Java developers, and this title is especially focused for this large audience sector.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Kyle Roche is the head of Sales Engineering and Enablement at Appirio. Appirio built one of the first prototypes for Java support on App Engine which was shows at the Campfire launch. Appirio builds applications that leverage App Engine or the Force.com platform. Other areas of expertise are in Facebook app development and Amazon Web Services.

Kyle’s website: http://www.kyleroche.com

Appirio Tech Blog: http://techblog.appirio.com

Product Details

• Paperback: 375 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1st Edition. edition (December 17, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 143022553X
• ISBN-13: 978-1430225539
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,048,531 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars lacks in content, February 25, 2010

By 

M. Slater (CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Beginning Java Google App Engine (Paperback)

I was very frustrated with my purchase and I was contemplating to write a review out of frustration. However, after I've seen the 5-star reviews from other users, I couldn't believe my eyes. One review was raving about the code samples (absolutely ridiculous) and then I saw one other reader leaving a comment for the review saying that he's been working on the sample code for weeks and still couldn't make it work and I can relate to that.

I pre-order this book from Amazon and when I start reading it, it was a total disappointment. I've been working on GAE/J for a while now and I bought this book specifically to learn more about Google Accounts. The example projects are not complete and it requires you to fill in the blanks to make them work. I've also looked at the other chapters and they lack in content. The book tries to give you overall, breadth-first view of the technology (as you would expect from a beginner level book), but while doing so it mentions about bunch of GAE topics, but fails on giving good coverage for that topic. Especially in chapter 4, when the author(s) talk about frameworks, they don't mention about gotchas on how to make these frameworks work at the first place, because if you're using Spring, BlazeDS and GraniteDS (or any other frameworks, you need to do certain tweaks to make these frameworks/technologies/APIs work with GAE, because some of the Java APIs are "black-listed" by the App Engine for the obvious reasons.

If you're a beginner, this is not a book for you. If you're advanced, then again this book doesn't give you enough in-depth information of the GAE/J topics. In conclusion, it's sad to say, but this book is useless! You can save money just by going to Google's App Engine website and find more up-to-date and complete information, because they keep changing/upgrading the SDKs for GWT and the App Engine almost every month.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars disappointed in lack of effort, April 10, 2010

By 

john Middendorf (Colorado) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Beginning Java Google App Engine (Paperback)

I'm disappointed in the lack of effort the authors did in compiling this book. They do seem to know the material, but the examples are largely just pages and pages of code that are not very well explained, and not very well tailored for a learning environment. For example, I consider Google's online tutorials excellent, such as this one here [...]

In contrast, the examples in this book are lazily put together. One of the key components to Google App Engine is the concept of Servlets. In this book, the authors dump 23 pages of code (pp 47 to 70), with tedious extraneous code, such as hundreds of irrelevant table styles (td bgcolor=#ffffff ). Not only that, but instead of just providing a single form element or two to make the point, the reader has to sift through pages of repetitive code doing the same thing for multiple extraneous elements. In the 23 pages, it is easy to miss the key critical things, such as how key elements are linked to other parts of the code. All that code could be reduced to a few pages to make the same points in a clear manner.

Unbelievably, they do the same thing in the next example explaining the Google Web Toolkit. Instead of just a one text element coded to enhance understanding, tons of extra code is devoted to coding repetitive elements, in this case, all seven days of the week are coded (with each 'day' element coded separately--taking up pages of code). It's clear they just dumped code from some sample projects instead of considering what would useful for teaching concepts.

Other "tutorials" such as how to link Flex, are copied from internet sources, but even more sparsely explained, and don't even seem to function, as another reviewer explained in terms of imported libraries. Often, a block of key code is shown, with no explanation of which file it should be part of (and Google App Engine requires coordination of a lot of different files). It's pretty obvious not a lot of effort was put into these sections.

Much better to understand the concepts of Google App Engine is the O'Reilly book, Programming Google App Engine. However, the O'Reilly book also lacks good tutorials.

Beginning Google App Engine does have some good information in it, specifically the introduction , but most of that information can be found online. I don't recommend this book.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Difficult to Follow, April 6, 2010

By 

K. Manning (Japan) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Beginning Java Google App Engine (Paperback)

(minus) There was some value in this book, but I felt that there was just too much detail up front. There are several pages of code plus conversation on third party products such as Spring that I felt was too much information way too early in the book, although I'm sure the topics are appropriate somewhere. I finally just stopped reading to find a different book.

Considering this is a beginner book to such a topic, shorter iterations would have been helpful. For example, there were about 5 JSP pages, GWT, Servlets, Java class files, etc.. and talk of Spring and other such topics in a short amount of time.

I was hoping for one servlet, one (short) JSP page and then incrementally add small pieces to build the important foundations so that my short term memory could get wrapped around the topic.

(positive)I really appreciated the extended list of frameworks and their correspond states of compatibility with Google App Engine. I will take that knowledge with me as I'm sure I'll want to make use of some kind of framework.