Customer Reviews

Early Adopter JXTA: Peer-to-Peer Computing with Java

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4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

If you are new to JXTA and P2P computing, this is the book you need. If you want to know all about the JXTA API, you might want to look around a little more.

I loved chapter three, providing an overview of what is going on behind the scenes. This is an excelent example of how this book fills the gap. The only thing I found a little disturbing is the flood of different views on the JXTA architecture.

The one thing I *really* hate about the book is the EZEL lock-in. EZEL (Eazy Entry Library) tries to hide the JXTA complexity by wrapping it in a simplified API. First of all, it appeared be quite hard to track the EZEL code. (It appeared to be part of the general code download at WROX.) Apart from that, it completely hides the JXTA API, so in a way, the title of this book could have been changed to 'Early Adopter: EZEL'.

This book is a REAL disappointment from Sing Li and Wrox. I have
other books by Li (Jini) and it is excellent... First off, about half the book requires a library called EZEL. The thing doesn't exist. It's not at jxta.org, there's nothing at the Wrox website. So, on page 154, under "Creating Our Very First JXTA Service", you get stopped dead in your tracks because of this non-existent library. If I see Sing Li or the Wrox folks at Java One this year...

My first book on JXTA. No quite what i was hoping for, the first couple of chapters are excellent.
Working examples accompanied by diagrams and pictures, really helpful.
BUT....
As soon as Mr Li gets to the EZEL library (which i failed to find) the book gets hugely complicated. Why? Because you can't find the EZEL library (at least not in the edition i had), and part of the book is dedicated to teaching programming JXTA with that library. What if i wanted not to program with EZEL? what if i want to write my own library?
At this point i didn't feel comfortable and had to skip those chapters to the working examples at the end, which again were good.
If you are starting JXTA then it might be worth reading the first few chapter, but beware of some spelling mistakes and assumptions made regarding your knowledge of Java.

With a series title like "early adopter" and coming from WROX (most of their books are great but sometimes you feel that with all these authors...the quality is sometimes missing) I was a little afraid to buy this book. I am happy to say that this is an excellent resource. The author has a very nice writing style that is easy to understand. The book does a job of giving you the background and the history of this new initiative. He also covers the Shell and how to expand it. I think this is the greatest think they could have done. It gets you up and running and doing very useful development out of the box compared to the infrastructure that needs to be setup with Jini. The last part of the book helps you create your own applications. What I also like is that there is lots of information in the book that is not found on the website. All the examples in the book worked, I haven't finish chapter 6. This book will bring up to speed and will provide you a good base to go digging deeper into the actual implementation and all the added services and applications that are currently available, which the author does not cover nor what is the goal of the book to do so.

I hope all of the "early adopter" series are of this quality.

I love anything produced by Wrox rarely do u find their books uncomprehensive or lacking something you ought to know and this book is definetely no exception.
JXTA the ideas this book proposes it can do will revalutionise the way we think of distributed systems I can't wait till they release a more detailed book once the technology realy picks up.Though I was as much excited about Jini as JXTA I doubt that the latter will be a disapointment.
In the book I can only find one unforgivable fault....It ended.