Customer Reviews

Enterprise JavaBeans 2.1

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Enterprise JavaBeans 2.1 by Denninger and Peters is a basic summary of all of the major features of EJBs. It covers the typical J2EE architecture, the three types of beans, issues such as transactionality and security, and gives some examples where EJBs would be useful - all of the standard stuff such a book would be expected to contain. It would serve fairly well as an introduction to EJB concepts or as a reference.

The book is not much more than this, though. I would have liked to have read about some of the authors' real experience with EJB's, both good and bad. What are their opinions on the high points or J2EE, as well as the shortfalls? What are some of the practical aspects that tend to trip up people and organizations who use EJBs? Every developer who has used J2EE knows it is not always easy, it is not always container- or platform-independent, and the solutions are not always the best (take, for example, CMP, especially pre-EJB 2.0). For example, this sentence from the book, while clearly an ideal espoused by Sun, is something many experienced developers have learned is not always achieved: "In the development of enterprise-related logic in Enterprise Beans the developer is freed totally from having to deal with technical system issues". Finally, based on the title of the book, I was hoping for a section on what's new in EJB 2.1, but instead found only occasional mentions of 2.1 features throughout the different sections.

I wouldn't recommend Enterprise JavaBeans 2.1, except perhaps as a first introduction. It's too much a straightforward summary of the EJB specification that could have come straight from Sun Microsystems, and is lacking much realistic advice on EJB usage.

This book is aimed towards the experienced Java developer who is familiar with distributed environments, Servlets, JSPs, and JDBC and wants to get a good in-depth introduction into Enterprise JavaBeans. The book starts with an introduction to EJB technology and the EJB architecture in general. This book is translated into English and these beginning chapters seem to suffer a little bit in the translation as some of the sentences are poorly constructed. The later chapters don't have this problem however. After the introduction, the book covers each of the different types of beans (session, entity, and message) in detail with a discussion of when and how to use them. Examples of their use from both the server and client side are provided. The deployment descriptors for each type are also covered. Transactions and security are discussed with examples that help to clearly explain how these mechanisms work in EJBs. The authors then discuss some of the practical issues that arise when developing an EJB application such as performance and bean interaction. In the final chapter, the authors explain where EJB fits in with Web Services and then give a brief discussion of the standard timer service added to EJB 2.1. The authors do a good job of not just showing how to use EJBs but also explaining what it is and why you would want to use it. The level of detail makes this a good book for both developers and architects.