Mastering BEA WebLogic Server: Best Practices for Building and Deploying J2EE Applications [Paperback]

Gregory Nyberg (Author), Robert Patrick (Author), Paul Bauerschmidt (Author), Jeff McDaniel (Author), Raja Mukherjee (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 18, 2003 | ISBN-10: 047128128X | ISBN-13: 978-0471281283 | Edition: 1

• Designed to show experienced developers how to become power developers with BEA WebLogic
• Covers BEA WebLogic Server version 8.1 and earlier versions
• A perfect companion to the bestselling book, Mastering Enterprise JavaBeans, Second Edition (0471-41711-4)
• Companion Web site includes technology updates and links to related sites

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

"The book Mastering WebLogic is a technical tour de force that reveals WebLogic’s inner workings and provides solid, pragmatic advice for high volume production deployments. If you are serious about using WebLogic Server, you should read this book."
—Richard Monson-Haefel, author of Enterprise JavaBeans, 3rd Edition (O’Reilly 2001)

Written by leading experts in the field, this advanced-level book provides best practices for developing and deploying WebLogic Server 8.1 applications. The authors share their real-world experience with WebLogic Server and its features to help you understand not only how things can be done, but also how things should be done. They walk you through different design solutions, architectures, construction techniques, deployment options, and management techniques, explaining the benefits of each alternative. A realistic example application that leverages key technologies such as JSP, Jakarta Struts, JMS, EJB, and Web Services is also built and deployed to help illustrate selected techniques and best practices. Each decision made during the development and deployment of the application is discussed in detail, providing insight and direction for similar decisions in your own efforts.

The best practices presented cover a wide range of topics, ranging from Web application and EJB development recommendations to advanced administration, performance tuning, and configuration techniques. With these best practices, you’ll quickly learn how to:

• Choose an appropriate architecture for your WebLogic Server application
• Package and deploy WebLogic Server applications properly
• Leverage the latest EJB, JMS, Security, and Web services features available in WebLogic Server 8.1
• Deliver and troubleshoot scalable high-performance systems
• Configure and manage your development, test, and production environments for optimum productivity and performance

The companion Web site contains example code and installation instructions, a detailed walkthrough of a complete example application, and links to additional resources.

About the Author

GREGORY NYBERG is a technical architect, focusing on the development of enterprise J2EE applications using BEA WebLogic Server.

ROBERT PATRICK is Senior Director of Technology at BEA Systems, specializing in designing and troubleshooting large-scale systems built with BEA WebLogic Server.

PAUL BAUERSCHMIDT is a former software engineer in the WebLogic Server Security Team at BEA Systems.

JEFF McDANIEL is Senior Director of the Technical Solutions Group at BEA Systems.

RAJA MUKHERJEE is Director of Systems Engineering at BEA Systems.

Product Details

• Paperback: 768 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (August 18, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 047128128X
• ISBN-13: 978-0471281283
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.4 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,065,774 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Exellent book for advanced users, September 8, 2004

By 

Michael S. Wolfson (Mile High City) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mastering BEA WebLogic Server: Best Practices for Building and Deploying J2EE Applications (Paperback)

I really like this book. It is not for beginners, and is not an "Intro to J2EE". However, for advanced developers, and especially those leaning towards the administation aspects of WebLogic Server, this book is an excellent resource.

The examples in this book are straighforward, and the accompianing discussion is well written and easy to follow.

A lot of discussions in this book cover advanced topics leaning towards deployment and administration (such as tuning JVMs, or understanding Thread usage), but there are some excellent discussions regarding architecture as well. There is not a lot of material discussing developing J2EE code.

This book should be a part of any advanced J2EE developers library, especially those using WebLogic (since so many of the examples are targeted towards that platform).

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great resource for all levels of WebLogic developers, September 28, 2003

By 

Eric L. Ma (Berkeley Heights, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mastering BEA WebLogic Server: Best Practices for Building and Deploying J2EE Applications (Paperback)

I read the book cover to cover and I must say this is by far the best WebLogic book I have read. It is very up-to-date (covers WLS 8.1), and it pulls all the WLS programming best practices that are scattered around a dozen or more newsgroups and web sites into a single volume. Unlike similar books that cover WLS in the context of J2EE alphabet soup, this book focuses on the following topics: web application, EJB, JMS, Security, Admin, Performance Tuning, Development and Deployment env setup, and Web Services, which represent >90% of your J2EE development needs. You will find practical info in every single chapter, and I found the discussion around entity beans, JMS, and JVM tuning exceptional. The "bigrez" sample is a miniature real world application, and the discussion on its design helps to tie the whole book together. For WebLogic beginners, don't look anywhere else - this book will get you started fast. Even for people like me who has a few WLS projects under the belt, you will come away with new information, and it also reinforces some of your hard-learned lessons.

Just a small complaints to conclude this review: I would move Chapter 13 on dev env best practices to Chapter 1, and reduce the amount of discussion on JSP. I also want to see some detailed examples on complex CMP relationships, as well as a separate and in-depth chapter on clustering that covers distributed JMS, MDB, and entity beans of various concurrency/caching startegies.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very good book, October 15, 2003

By 

Olivier Michel (Uppsala, Sweden) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mastering BEA WebLogic Server: Best Practices for Building and Deploying J2EE Applications (Paperback)

This is by far the best book on J2EE and Weblogic I have read. I like how the author explains every single step of a project (the bigrez.com project), from design to deployment, and justifying not only every choice he has made, but also taking time to explain other alternatives, why they don't fit for this project, and where they could be more useful. The Struts framework is widely discussed, and EJBGen has found a little place in the discussion.
It's very nice also to avoid "J2EE for newbies" type of discussion, this book is really starting where many other books and references stop.