Customer Reviews

EJB 3 in Action

5 star:		(32)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

"EJB 3 in Action" manages to be an excellent read for both people new to EJB and people who have been using EJB 2.X. There are side notes throughout about significant changes from EJB 2.X. For larger topics that someone new to EJB 2.X might not know, the topic is covered in the appendix. The examples are interesting and well written, so it isn't boring reading about the purpose of a session bean if you already know it.

What really impressed me were the differences between this book and Sun's J2EE tutorial. The majority of examples used Java 5 syntax (for looping and the like.) This made the examples feel like EJB 3 examples rather than an old book robotically updated. Further, the authors explain when to use a deployment descriptor vs annotations. Sun sticks to the party line and barely mentions the deployment descriptor. The "EJB 3 in Action" approach is much more useful for gaining practical advice.

Best practices are described throughout. The authors don't assume you know Java 5 features and explain them as necessary. All the expected topics are covered. Additionally, there are chapters on Spring integration and migrating from EJB 2.X. The examples are app server agnostic, but they show you how to use one in the appendix. Finally, the appendixes provide an excellent reference for both the annotations and deployment descriptor.

As many of you, I was and am very skeptical about EJBs. They have complicated the enterprise world and haven't really delivered on their promise. Now there is EJB3. When starting the book, I just had one question: Did they "fixed it". After reading this very convincing book, my tentative answer would be: Yes.

"EJB3 in Action" is an easy to read and easy to understand introduction to EJB3. The book doesn't require you to know too much other topics and starts from the beginning. It starts with giving an overview of everything and then from there moves into the different bean types. From there it'll just in the more advanced topics.

One of the things I really liked about the book is that it really tries to answer the questions which I think much of the readers have. Questions like: Why would I use EJB3, I just stopped using EJBs. Can I combine EJBs with spring and how? These are exactly the type of questions people will want answered.

I'm not a EJB expert at all. However, I found the book easy to read and enjoyable. I've learned a lot from the authors while reading the book. I'd recommend it for everyone who wants to know more about EJB3. Great job!

Having struggled with the complexities and problems of EJB 1 and 2 (most java programmers I talked to doing large EJB projects, for example, stay clear from using entity beans), I was really drawn to the advantages of EJB3 as described in the first chapter of "EJB3 in Action". The book's next 2 chapters, in keeping true to the title of the book, provide a whirlwind tour that shows EJB3 in action. I soon became an evangelist for EJB3 recommending it to my work colleagues where we subsequently upgraded to WebLogic 10 with plans to upgrade our java projects from EJB2 to EJB3.

The book is well written and presents an in-depth and thorough discussion of the EJB3 architecture. Of special note is the fact that all java beans in EJB3 are written as POJO's and defined in terms of annotations. I only wish there were a few chapters on how to effectively leverage JUnit (vs. Cactus) to make unit testing easier.

A fair share of the book is devoted to lucidly describing the persistence API and corresponding concepts dealing with object relational mapping that have promised to address and minimize the complexities and performance issues that have discouraged many a java programmer from tackling the entity beans of EJB2/3.

The book also deals with practical issues such as packaging your EJB3 applications, performance tuning, upgrading from EJB2 to EJB3 and exposing EJBs as web services. There is even a chapter devoted to using EJB3 with the Spring framework.

There are plenty of source code examples in the book which you can download online, tailored for Sun's Glassfish application server, as well as those from Oracle and JBoss.

I recommend this book highly for anyone who is considering moving up to EJB3 and wanting a clear, concise and well written book on the topic.

I bought this book since I needed a good introductive book for the ejb3 world in order to get quickly up to speed with all the techinicism.

The book is quite complete, well written, with good examples. It is a very valuable tool to enter the ejb3 world.
The only flaw of this book is, in my humble opinion, the fact that quite a few times advanced topics are explicitly deemed as being out of the scope of the book. I mean, I was expecting that, but anyway I felt a bit delusional since the book was very good.

To summarise, if you want to get a grasp on the ejb3 world quikly I am pretty sure this is the book for you.

Great book, for learning and as reference. Has many good examples, limited to the really useful and necessary. I'd recommend it as the base for learning EJB 3.

A very nice and broad coverage of EJB 3 with a very simple and excellently crafted case study. The book starts very lightly on this complex subject and slowly dives into the details of advanced concepts like interceptors, transactions, security, JPA and performance issues. Of course developing each scenario with the case study. I like the idea of case study being simple and developing it based on complexity. Overall very good book with a very smooth read. I have it available on my reference desk helping me to deal with the issues of EJB migration, EJB 3 as web service and integration of EJB 3 with Spring framework.

I don't like to read very long reviews, so for people like me, here it goes: if you are new to EJB and want to learn it, definitely buy this book, it's great stuff. If you are looking for SCBCD5 preparation materials, this is the first thing you should look into, unless you are an experienced EJB developer just going for the cert. After reading this, grab the EJB 3.0 specs - you will be able to understand the concepts, the descriptions, basically everything you need to know.

Now the longer one in case you want more information.

The book is very reader friendly, the writing style is light enough to concentrate for long, but very informative nontheless. This is the book you should read when you are an EJB 3.0 greenhorn, it leads you from basic concepts to good knowledge of the topic (EJB core and JPA, additinally mentioning other Java EE elements like connectors and web modules), with easily uderstandable and short examples along the way. Pretty good introduction to JMS if the reader is not familiar with it is also a big plus for me. Also, the book uses Java 5 features (just as EJB 3.0 do), and if the reader is not familiar with them, there is a short introduction, and the code throughout the book uses it (enums, foreach loops...), which is nice.

I have read a few EJB books, and this one has some unique features - many chapters are summarized with best practices, a short discussion of pros and cons of the approaches shown. Also, very good chapters on EJB 3.0 to EJB 2.1 (and earlier) migration / integration (both ways, i.e. how to use EJB 3.0 in a EJB 2.1 application and vice versa), and a whole chapter dedicated to comparing EJB with Spring, explaining how the two can cooperate and ways to integrate them (versions of Spring discussed are 1.2 and 2.0). At the end, in the appendices, the user can find all deployement descriptor's reference (ejb-jar.xml, persistence.xml and mappings), which is much more edible than reading their respective XSDs. Also, I liked the part on packaging and class-loaders, which gives you some insight into how application servers usually handle this, and how to use it in case of a multi-module application (for instance, how to package everything so that your web module can see and use your entities and your ejbs).

If the user has further questions to ask, or any doubts, they can visit the authors online forum (with the outhors actively contributing to discussions). If this not enough, Javaranch forums are also very helpful, and Reza Rahman (one of the authors) visits it very often. The opportunity to talk to the authors is a good thing, and makes you feel the technology is not that hard to learn - they are real people, after all ;-0

What I didn't like was something a few Amazon reviews pointed out already - telling what we will learn next, and in the next section, repeating what we have just learned. That's the only thing, and it's not a big issue.

All in all, I value this book very much, and it is a fairly earned 5-star review.

If you want a book for a complete look at EJB 3 - THIS is the book! I have looked at aeveral other EJB 3 books and I find this one does a outstanding, complete and thorough job of looking at this very powerful implementation of EJBs. It is a very easily readable book that takes the reader from the basics through advanced issues in deployment and the creation of Web Services. The format of covering each type of EJB and following this discussion with Best Practices I find quite useful and informative. The discussion of ORM, JPQL, Entity Manager is well handled and quite clear. The section on the various aspects of deployment is well handled as are the various issues of how to use/reference EJBs from all tiers in an app server.
In summary I feel this text does an excellent job of looking at the EJB 3 specification and covers virtually all aspects of their use.

My company's library basically gives me access to all books I want, so I used to have a big stack of big EJB3 books on my desk. But during 2 months of daily work with EJB3 I often found this book helpful where others weren't and almost never found it the other way 'round. Only exception: Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0 (5th Edition) That book sometimes just has a broader coverage, delivering details that "EJB3 in Action" doesn't. But still, "EJB3 in Action" remains the best-understandable EJB3 book with (almost) the best coverage of topics. I have now returned all other books than the 2 mentioned here to the library, and I always look in this book first.

While I agree with Rob on the language issue, what counts is the result, and that is usually the best with this book.

I have been working with Enterprise Javabeans for many years. This really is by far the best resource to date on Enterprise Javabeans. One of the many strengths of this book is to show how the Springframework blends into the EJB framework. I have had a lot of success in blending these frameworks. The authors really believe in the EJB framework unlike another major author of EJB books.