Customer Reviews

Pro Flex on Spring (Expert's Voice in Web Development)

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

 

 

I did buy this book to learn how to integrate flex with spring using Spring BlazeDS integration. The informations for this are not sequential and this make hard to follow this book.

While the contents is interesting the code samples are for the most part wrong, you can type exactly what's on the book and will get tons of compilation errors; if you try to follow the book as a tutorial you will end up spending a lot of time figuring out what's wrong with the code in the book (specially if you are a flex beginner like me)

This is an excellent book. There is lots of technical information available separately on Flex and Spring, but I really like how this book is all about real world projects built with Flex/Spring, providing practical advice and examples.

It has plenty of "best practice" and architecture style information based on the authors in-depth experience with Flex and Spring. I am using Flex and Grails as well, and this book is helpful for this combination as well given that Grails is built on Spring.

Overall, Pro Flex on Spring is an enjoyable and very valuable book which I'm glad I purchased.

The most interesting parts in this book are those where the author shares his real-world experience in building large applications. You really feel that he has "been there" and has worked through the tough challenges of enterprise applications. It's nice to read his advice, and I really liked the confidence he showed in writing some direct statements in what he considers best practices. Too many authors out there hide behind "it depends" and don't put themselves out on the line, never really stating anything definite.

Otherwise, I find this book to be flawed in too many aspects. Most of the sample code has errors and you will have to figure out how to make things work. Personally, I didn't mind so much because it was a good learning experience, but as an author myself I appreciate the effort that it takes to make a book as error-free as possible. The author and publisher's team did not make that effort here.

I was also quite disappointed that the later stages of the book consisted mostly of long and repetitive code listings. It's not normal to be reading listing after listing of the same model object pattern, the same service interface/implementation, and the same dao interface/implementation pattern, complete with import statements. Further, the author did not at all take advantage of a generic service/dao, nor annotations and automatic discovery that Spring and Hibernate provide. I was embarrassed by all the boilerplate code that was printed and which could have all been avoided. That kind of code is what (unnecessarily) gives Java development a bad name.

In conclusion, I can't recommend this book. As another review suggested, you are better off getting a solid Spring book (Craig Walls) and a solid Flex book. It wouldn't be difficult to find information on the Web on how to integrate the two.

I really thought I could get a lot out of this book. I mean, it has everything, the entire kitchen-sink of all of the current Java technologies - Spring, Hibernate, Ant etc. etc. and then Flex on top of it all. Sounds good but in the end it just gives me indigestion. The build files don't work correctly, the illustrations of the project setups are wrong and a lot of the code doesn't compile correctly if you can figure out how to compile it at all. Finally after Chapt. 5 I've put it aside. I feel I'd be better off taking all of this one technology at a time; it's a shame software development has become so convoluted.

This is one of the best technical books I've read in years. It presents multiple architectural options to the reader with pros anc cons to consider for your situtation. The sample code is broad enough to cover all the integration layers and provides clear direction on how to build a scalable flex UI that works with a java backend. Great book and my compliments to the author.

This book is really just a tutorial that doesn't go very deep into any particular part of either Flex or Spring. If you are a Spring developer then this is too simple for you. If you are new to Spring you will need another book anyway. The same goes for the Flex side of the equation. Most of the information can be found with a simple google search on the internet. I would recommend that you buy two books instead one on Flex and one on Spring. Then just google as to how to put them together.