Pro Jakarta Velocity: From Professional to Expert [Paperback]

Rob Harrop (Author)

Book Description

Series: Books for Professionals by Professionals | Publication Date: August 30, 2004

Nearly any application, you build, requires some form of output. Often the format of that output can change on a regular basis, creating a heavy maintenance burden, and a restrictive test cycle. By utilizing the power of the Velocity template engine you can integrate templated output into your application, decoupling the application logic from the output format. This book offers an in-depth look at Velocity. You’ll start right off with configuration and setup and work through to full application development using Velocity, as well extensions to the Velocity framework. This is not just a book about Web development – Velocity has many uses beyond being a simple replacement for JSP, and this book discusses and demonstrates many of these uses.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Rob Harrop is Lead Software Architect for Cake Solutions Limited. In this role, he designed and built a variety of enterprise level applications in both .NET and J2EE. At Cake Solutions, he is responsible for the overall technical strategy of out company and out clients – a job involving a great deal of research and development. Rob has been involved with Microsoft .NET since its early alpha stages and implemented one of the first successful .NET projects for the UK government. Recently, he worked on a recruitment portal using Struts and Velocity, a central billing and payment aggregation platform using C#, and an education extranet using Struts and Hibernate. For the past 18 months, his research has focused on open source technologies, and Rob is extensively knowledgeable on all Jakarta Projects, the Hibernate project, JBoss and the Apache web server.

Product Details

• Paperback: 370 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (August 30, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 159059410X
• ISBN-13: 978-1590594100
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,150,391 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Possibly better than JSPs?, October 1, 2004

By 

W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Pro Jakarta Velocity: From Professional to Expert (Paperback)

Harrop puts forth an interesting claim in his book. He offers Velocity as a significant improvement over using JSPs to make dynamic web pages. By now, at least in the Java world, JSPs in combination with servlets, is the most common way to do this. Not the least because it gives a clear implementation of the MVC design pattern.

But Harrop points out that JSPs always had an awkward syntax. Which for complex pages leads to miserable, error-prone coding. Plus, the pages might be slow to build. Velocity seems to offer a coding approach that is more natural than JSPs. And you certainly don't have to abandon MVC. Harrops shows how to reimplement MVC, while using Velocity and hooking to a database, and coupled to Struts and Spring.

The code examples in the book are not complicated. That too is part of his message.

You may want to look closer at the book.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Complete coverage of Velocity, November 24, 2004

By 

Thomas Paul (Plainview, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Pro Jakarta Velocity: From Professional to Expert (Paperback)

I have always been a strong supporter of Velocity. I even wrote an article for JavaRanch about Velocity back in March. Velocity is an open source template framework designed to simplify the task of generating content such as web pages, email, or any other text-based output. The Velocity documentation available from Apache is short, low on examples, and leaves holes (even if it is fairly good compared to some other open source projects). This book fills in the gaps and gives excellent coverage of the many features that are available with Velocity.

The book starts with an introduction to Velocity and then explains how to install and configure it. The author then discusses the Velocity Template Language, examines its shortcomings, and demonstrates how to get around them. Best practices are covered early in the book. Although Velocity is normally thought of as a web-based framework, the author doesn't let us forget that it can be used for both stand-alone and web applications and gives us detailed chapters on both. Velocity tools are well covered including Anakia, which can be used to transform XML. The Velocity architecture is explained as well as ways to extend that architecture.

The examples are well thought out and give good coverage of the features of Velocity. The most interesting part of the examples is how little work it is to integrate Velocity into a well-designed framework. The author shows how Velocity fits into both Struts and Spring, demonstrating that Velocity is not meant to replace these frameworks but rather to simplify content generation in any framework. I can strongly recommend this book for anyone interested in Velocity. For anyone not interested in Velocity, the question is, why not?

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Missing a lot, February 13, 2006

By 

A. S. Johnson "seeking change" (Anchorage, AK) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Pro Jakarta Velocity: From Professional to Expert (Paperback)

I am using this book to bring myself up to speed on a project that combines Velocity with Struts. I'm working with Struts and Velocity modules built by a consulting company. Before the project, I didn't know either one. Now I am in the middle of the project and somewhat familiar with both. Most of the velocity commands I am able to figure out pretty quickly without the book, which is good because every time I try to find something ($link.setAction for example, which is needed to obtain the URL for forwarding) it's not there. Maybe I'm missing something, but if I am, it also is not identified in this book. I'm doing much better by referring to my Struts reference(Programming Jakarta Struts) and searching the web.