Customer Reviews

POJOs in Action: Developing Enterprise Applications with Lightweight Frameworks

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book covers the use of several lightweight frameworks for developing enterprise applications. If you have no clue at all about the issues involved in enterprise Java, I would not advise reading this yet. Despite being C#-based, Applying Domain-Driven Design and Patterns by Jimmy Nilsson would provide the gentle introduction required. On the other hand, if you've had previous experience with server side programming, and want to be brought up to speed quickly on how POJO-based frameworks can be used to replace EJB 2.x style development, this is right up your alley. If you've got used to computer books belying their dimensions with disappointingly little information, you'll be pleasantly surprised with PiA - it's packed with good content.

What's nice about this book is that it goes beyond the basics of the likes of Spring that most people have read several times already (e.g. explaining what dependency injection is) and actually shows how it obviates the need to run in an EJB container and do JNDI look ups. You don't just get to read about, e.g. lazy and eager loading, the author shows you how to use Hibernate and JDO to implement those strategies. That said, this book is not a replacement for documentation or specialised references, so it doesn't get too bogged down. Particularly helpful is that the author provides pros and cons for each of the different approaches he advocates, which helps put them into perspective.

The focus of the book is on using Object Relational Mapping tools, either Hibernate or JDO, in combination with Spring's dependency injection and AOP-based interceptors for transactions. There is also converage of the more procedural-based iBATIS, and using EJB3, although the author does not seem to be a big fan of the latter, despite it being an improvement on EJB2. Many of the persistence-related patterns in Martin Fowler's Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture are covered here, including the concurrency patterns like pessimistic and optimistic locking. The author shows how to implement these patterns with the frameworks, often showing multiple ways of doing things. He's not afraid to highlight where one framework is lacking compared to another, which is refreshing.

As you can perhaps tell, the coverage is predominantly devoted to the persistence layer - there's not much here on the presentation layer, although there is some material on using servlets. If you're looking for lots of detail on how to hook your domain model up to, say, Struts, or one of the many other web frameworks, you won't find much here.

My only quibble with the book is that although the author pushes increased testability as a important benefit of freeing oneself from EJB containers (a good thing) and uses JUnit tests to illustrate how to develop a POJO-based application (another good thing), the tests use mock objects heavily. I hesitate to call that a bad thing, as clearly there's a whole bunch of people who are much cleverer than I using them productively, but here there's so much set up and setting of expectations, that the actual test is hard to spot, and the intention difficult to fathom. Your mileage may of course vary.

If you're neither an enterprise dummy nor expect, I wholeheartedly recommend this excellent book.

It seems that the Java community has been so fast in developing new tools to assist in system development that it's hard to keep track. In fact, it almost seems that you could spend virtually all your working time on just reading the big thick manuals that each new development seems to require. And then when you want some guidence on which took you should use on any particular project you are faced with an almost religious ferver as to this one vs. that one.

This book is a practical guide to using the new lightweight frameworks with POJO's (Plain Old Java Objects). It gives you an overview of Hibernate, JDO and Spring. More important, is that it defines the features of each with relation to the others. That in, for this kind of thing use this one, and for that kind of thing, use that one.

It's clear that Mr. Richardson has used these programs to develop real applications and he shares his knowledge well.

I interviewed a candidate about four months ago who was recommended as an effective programmer and problem-solver. Unfortunately, although this appeared to be true, the candidate had not kept up-to-date with the movement to "lighter," more testable designs, and hadn't read a Java book since Alur's Core J2EE Patterns. The candidate wasn't hired, but because of his apparent interest in learning about the technologies we were using (Spring, Hibernate), I later mailed him a copy of Rod Johnson's Expert One-on-One J2EE Development without EJB.

If the same thing happened today, I would unreservedly send POJOs In Action.

Chris Richardson tackles a very difficult task, surveying an entire movement rather than just a single framework or standard. In my opinion he succeeds wonderfully. Because of the experience and sound judgment that informs his analysis, the result is a trustworthy guide to what is still fairly wild territory. There are without doubt omissions in his coverage, and experienced readers will notice them. I don't consider these complaints significant, because in my opinion they misunderstand the intended audience of this book.

I'm not sure exactly how this book will find its way to its correct audience (working software developers who DON'T know Spring, Hibernate, and/or Domain-Driven Design), but really I hope it does. Chris' text is engaging, confident, well-reasoned, and compelling. Hopefully it will help a whole cadre of developers come up to speed quickly.

I am usually suspect of 500+ page books on software because they seem to waste paper on information that will become stale in a few months; I prefer to read shorter, inspirational books and lookup the details on-line. However, I found this book a worthy read. Chris writes "from the trenches" and shares his long journey from "sanctioned" heavy frameworks to the "lightweight" rebels that have won the battle for the way enterprise java applications are written. Perhaps the most important lesson of this book is how to keep an open mind in the face of entrenched technologies and overwhelming marketing power of the big vendors.

This is a book that gives back proportionally to the effort you put into it. As with most books that provide a thorough coverage of their subject, different readers should approach it in different ways. Experienced architects and senior developers already on the POJO bandwagon may find the greatest benefit in comparing a competing framework to the one they currently use with the help of copious examples implemented in each of the major frameworks covered. The many named idioms can help them better explain challenging concepts to the rest of the team.

Developers who are still maintaining old-style EJB applications should take the time to go through the examples to fully appreciate the benefits of the lightweight approach and prepare themselves for the inevitable adjustment in their toolset.

Finally, the book discusses testing java persistence in some detail which fits well with the increasingly more popular Agile practices such as Test-Driven Development.

As with all Manning books, you can also get in PDF format from their website.

This is a comprehensive look at lighterweight Java persistence mechanims like Hibernate, JDO, and EJB 3. The text is well written and easy to understand. The code is marked up nicely. And the illustrations are good quality and not overused. Definitely a book worth looking at if you are interested in moving away from earlier EJB implementations.

I'm a bit late with my rating for this book, to be precise 3 years too late. Nevertheless I leave 5 stars today for it. The book teach you what POJOs really are through a full blown software development cycle starting from a requirements analysis to deployment. I've seen lots of people who use the term POJO for any kind of Java class. For those people I highly recommend this book to first get their thinking right on that issue.

POJOs in Action describes how POJOs and lightweight frameworks such as Spring, Hibernate, JDO, iBatis make it easier and faster to develop testable and maintainable applications. You will also learn how to apply test-driven development and object design to enterprise Java applications. This book is all about implementing enterprise applications using design patterns and lightweight frameworks.

This book is for developers as well as architects who are experienced in developing enterprise applications in Java using EJB framework and want to know how to use POJOs and lightweight frameworks effectively.

This book consists of four parts. Part 1 which has 2 chapters is an overview of POJOs and lightweight frameworks. Part 2 has 5 chapters in which you will learn about a combination of options to design applications with POJOs and lightweight frameworks. In Part 3 you will learn about other approaches for designing the business and database tiers. Part 4's 3 chapter's looks at some important database-relates issues we normally encounter when developing enterprise Java applications. I should also mention that this book is not a complete reference for any of the frameworks like Spring, Hibernate, iBATIS etc.

Chris Richardson has done an outstanding job; this book deserves 5 out of 5. I wish I could have given more. Once I started reading the book, it was hard for me to put it down. This book teaches you when to use and when not to use each of the frameworks while many other books blindly advocate the use of their favorite frameworks. It is a must have book for every Java developer as well as architect. This is an excellent book, go get it; should be in your library.

First, this book provides an excellent comparison of several popular "lightweight" java enterprise frameworks. These include Hibernate, JDO, and Spring. There is a wealth of information in here for anyone who is either 1) moving away from "classic" EJB2.* designs or 2) interested in choosing which frameworks are the most appropriate to solve a particular problem.

Second, this book goes through several, design pattern-based, examples. The examples are progressively applied to each framework, modified as appropriate.

This book is *not*, and doesn't intend to be, a complete reference for any of the frameworks it mentions. References and documentation for any frameworks used during a project would still be needed.

The diagrams and editing are good.

This is an excellent book for enterprise Java developers to get the best out of the POJO approach. "POJOs in Action" has done an exceedingly good job of covering a broad range of technologies (Spring, AOP, Hibernate, JDO, iBatis, etc.) and concepts (domain-driven design, dependency injection, AOP, unit testing, etc.) in a simple yet comprehensive manner. The code samples make the material useful in the real world applications. Further, this book contains many nuggets of information such as recovering from concurrency failures during a transaction and managing offline locking.

I highly recommend this book.

Chris Richardson uniquely combines practical wisdom and best practices to integrate domain-driven design and test-driven development for object-oriented Java enterprise applications using lightweight Spring, Hibernate, and JDO technologies.

It extends Martin Fowler's great book, "Enterprise Architecture Patterns," as well as the more recent "Domain-Driven Design" by Eric Evans, by providing useful design guidance and fantastic in-depth examples.

This is a powerful book for architects, developers, and consultants that belongs on your bookshelf right next to companion Manning books for "Spring in Action" and "Hibernate in Action", which address in-depth development with these popular open source Java technologies.