Customer Reviews

Professional BlazeDS: Creating Rich Internet Applications with Flex and Java (Wrox Programmer to Programmer)

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

 

 

Coming to Flex from a Java world, I clearly see two groups of people working on enterprise RIA projects:
1. People who know Java and J2EE and are novices to Flex
2. People who know Flex with a little understanding of what's going on on the server side (i.e. J2EE)

I'm interviewing lots of enterprise developers for various Flex/Java roles, and it seems to be a trend that most people do not understand internals of BlazeDS/LCDS. While you can definitely find bits and pieces of information on the subject by googling specific topics and going through the product documentation, this 300-page book is something that gives you the entire picture of Flex-BlazeDS-J2EE data flow. How many people know what's long polling and what why it's better than polling? How to configure channels and endpoints to use long polling with failover to polling? Can you push the data form the server to the client with BlazeDS? How can you modify and extend the communication layer of BlazeDS (front-end channels and server-side adapters)? What are the option of conneting BlazeDS with the ORM framework (Hibernate)?

This book gives you an overview of all these subjects with pretty simple to follow code samples. One of the reviewers wrote that he was falling to sleep while reading this book. Sure, it's a lot more interesting reading about developing flashy UI gadgets. Give me yet another Flex video player and a photo album application!

Unfortunately, there are boring areas in any Flex/Java enterprise application that can either turn your project either into a well performing stable RIA or put the server on its knees.

If you are looking for a fundamental manuscript on BlazeDS, this is not the book you need. But if you are a busy professional/tech lead/PM who needs to quickly get the big picture and understand what his/her options are, this book will definitely help you.

Very useful book for everyone working with Flex/AIR and remote data. If you ever wonder how Flash Remoting works from inside - this book is for you. BlazeDS is not only standalone Java server, but also comes bundled with Adobe Coldfusion 9 and Railo. Book will be helpful to Coldfusion/Railo developers to dig deeper into Flash Remoting and real-time messaging.

Reading this book was like reading a term paper that was written the night before it was due - it's filled with fluff, the grammar and flow gets worse the farther along you get, the chapters that sound like they'll be interesting are a waste of time. Save your money.

Let me start by saying that I understand that writing a book is really difficult. I wish the author success in his future endeavors, but as a customer I am very dissatisfied.

I was excited to get this book, but upon reading it I became much less enthusiastic. One of my biggest beefs with it is that the code is very poorly presented in the book. It also jumps around a lot. It is nearly impossible to sit down with this book alone and use the code in printed form to create a working example. The introduction to setting up a development environment is also terrible. I wish that I could get back my money and the time spent reading the book.

i must say this book really goes into the depths of blazeds. i have learned a ton from this book. my only frustrations were i hoped the java portions of the book were explained more since i am coming from a flex background. at times it got frustrating trying to understand how the java classes were structured...etc at times i would get errors because certain java classes were not imported because the sample in the book didnt show it. BUT at the same time it was great having to find these things out myself. overall, if you want to learn blazeds, i think this is one of the best books

K

I had very little experience with BlazeDS. I could not find time to search the net for BlazeDS related information. I was looking for a book but most of them had bad reviews till I came across this one. I felt, I found the book which would help me come up to speed and also save time. I was right.

I read the other posts and it seems like people learn through different mediums. Some with a lot of images, some with sample code and some with a lot of text explanation. This book was perfect for me and I would highly recommend it if you are new to BlazeDS or remoting from Flex in general. There was one chapter that I felt was very basic. It talked about the Flex controls which could have been avoided. I would give the benefit of doubt to the author.


Hope the review helps.

This book is hard reading, usually falling asleep while reading a paragraph. Generally a list of options is given to introduce topics and then later in the book because you read the list you understand everything about each of those options. The options were never explained in detail.

Basically, if you have an understanding of BlazeDS you don't need this book. If you don't have an understanding of BlazeDS, this book will not help you.

not very detailed, one can find nice documents and tutorials to have better understanding. As i was looking for a very specific part, i found pdf docs on site equally good. Considering, very few books are available, it serves a good overview from 3000ft to 1000ft to..etc..but i am looking for more rpc stuff rather than messaging..

I will highly recommend[...] over this book.

I have been looking for great BlazeDS/LCDS book for a while now and I was very excited when I came across this book. This is one of the very first one out there on this topic.

The book is NOT initutive and is not reader-friendly. Diagrams in the book are extremly not helpful and I will challenge that one may get bored quite easily by reading first couple of chapters.

Author sometimes skips lots of related theory and would even make you feel as if you are reading an audio book.

Author has to realize that an image is worth 1000 words.

Cant wait to see a book from "Heads First" on this topic.

Developer's guide available [...] is 1000 times better than this boring book.