33 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent treatment of the EJB 2.0 (PFD 2) spec, and more..., August 3, 2001
This review is from: Professional EJB (Paperback)
DISCLAIMER: I am also a tech reviewer, but trust me my intention is to provide an un-biased review here.
Let me start by sharing a secret: since January I have been eagerly awaiting the arrival of the 2nd Ed. of Ed Roman's hugely popular EJB book. Well, guess what: while Ed's book is going through community review at theServerside.com (I applaud Ed for being the first to do this, although it may or may not have slowed down the publication process), Wrox managed to go a leg up and became the first publisher of an EJB 2.0 book. Judging from the content of the current book, I have good reasons to say that it has raised the bar for the next generation of EJB titles coming out in the 2nd half of this year. Why? For one thing this book is based on the new EJB 2.0 spec and is up-to-date with PFD 2. As if this not enough a selling point by itself, Wrox also threw in a bunch of other high-octane topics, which made the total value proposition very compelling.
Let's now go through the content of the book, should we?
Chapters 1 to 4 mostly target EJB newcomers. Here you find short and sweet code samples for each flavor of EJB 1.1 session and entity beans. The author's emphasis is clearly on the client views and life cycles of these beans. Many state and sequence diagrams are used to help readers to come to a good grip of this critical material. I consider the goal superbly achieved, even though the code could have used some System.out.println calls to demo actually how bean classes are invoked by an EJB container. Well, save that as your homework.
Chapters 5 and 6 cover the new EJB 2.0 entity bean features we all have been waiting for, i.e., local interfaces, container-managed relationships, home methods, and EJB QL, among others. Dan O'Connor was at his best again explaining how the new spec solves some of EJB 1.1's toughest problems, like the need to use coarse-grained beans to cut down the number of remote calls. Experienced EJB developers, start here.
Chapter 7 introduces MDB. Frankly, I would like to see it augmented to include more details on transactional MDB. Well, Tyler Jewell should fill that void in Ed's book.
Chapter 8 deals with EJB environment, an often-confusing topic to many. How do I specify a DataSource in my ejb-jar.xml file? What does "java:comp/env/..." mean and where does it come from? You get the answers here.
Chapters 9 and 10 are about EJB transactions and Security. And let me tell you - read these vital topics here and forget about any other book. The discussion is so much better in breadth and depth than anywhere else. You need an example on a distributed TX? No problem. Want to understand security principals? They have it covered.
Chapter 11 starts a section on EJB design issues by providing some well-thought-out advice. The topics are so timely and relevant, like bean granularity, session vs. entity beans, BMP vs. CMP, which people ask on a daily basis at various EJB forums. EJB architect wanna-be's: read this chapter and start to enjoy what used to be sleepless nights.
Chapter 12 is about EJB Design Patterns. Well, I guess you cannot cover in one chapter what 3 Sun J2EE patterns gurus wrote in an entire book. Go buy "Core J2EE Patterns" instead.
Chapter 13 tries to show how to use UML to design EJB's. Frankly, this topic is yet to be mature and I doubt many people really practice such. It is still food for thought though.
Chapter 14: if you read no other chapter in the book, please do read this one. EJB developers live and die on the performance of the beans they write. Bean-test is probably the best-known EJB testing tool today and this chapter shows you how to use it.
Chapter 15 gives you more stuff like patterns, idioms that you can use to achieve optimal EJB performance and scalability. It also explains how EJB containers optimize callbacks. To be honest, things start to get a little bit repetitive but I had no major complaint.
Chapter 16: if you believe in BMP or writing SQL is in your blood, this is the one for you. You see how the dirty flag is used, and how coarse-grained bean modeling parent-child relational tables are written. This is a very useful chapter about handling traditional RDBMS-based relationships in the EJB 1.1 world.
Chapter 17: if you are a black-belt EJB developer and want to try you hand to become an EJB container writer, read this. If you brain is swollen by now, save this chapter for later.
Chapter 18 tries to put together a real-world J2EE sample application with servlets, JSP's and EJB's. Well, I only know one attempt that may have ended with some sort of a deliverable(the end-result is known as the Java Pet Store). FYI that pet project of someone has gone through 3 revisions and people are still tinkering with it.
Chapters 19 to 21 are about interoperating with EJB from COM, CORBA, and WAP clients. They are good enough to get you started by following the examples step-by-step.
Chapter 22 is about J2EE as Web Services. IBM's solution is the main one showcased here. Stay tuned.
The book ends with Appendices A to G, which all evolve around the deployment of a simple EJB app on various commonly found app servers. Take a look if you are starting out with EJB; otherwise join the Java Pet Store deployathon for more fun.
Now you ask me: what's missing from the book? Well, topics like EJB build and packaging strategy will definitely of interest to many. Discussion on clustering is also sorely missed.
Overall, I am excited about the book. I can imagine Ed Roman et al. and Richard Monson-Haefel working hard to top this one. To me, competition is a healthy thing.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great book even for the experienced!, August 17, 2001
This review is from: Professional EJB (Paperback)
This book does cover EJB2.0 extensively (the review below must be for a different book!). It not only covers the differences between 1.1 and 2.0 but it gives great illustrative examples.
Although I have been working with EJB for sometime, the book covers the topics that I don't have time to play around with - it provides very good coverage of topics such as Local interfaces and their uses, EjbQL, and home methods (finally!)
The only chapters 19-21 are the only ones that do not go into real depth - but they shouldn't since they relate to topics not necessarily meant for this book; however, they give a great examples to start from such as the wireless one.
I definitely recommend this book - I already have to the rest of my team!
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Very pleased with this purchase, August 22, 2001
This review is from: Professional EJB (Paperback)
I agree that this book is very good at covering the topics that it sets out in the outline.
This covers the EJBs in great detail - both 1.1 and 2.0. The knowledge of the individual authors definitely does come through - I have not purchased a Wrox title before, but I rather like the idea of multiple authors working on a book - I find the different views and experiences very powerful.
I did find that at times it did gloss over topics - I would have liked more information on the different pieces of the J2EE architecture, but that may have lost the focus of the book I suppose.
All in all, this book has been able to help us considerably in our development - it gives more than just 'theoretical' scenarios and has significantly reduced the learning curve amongst our team.
I never give perfect marks - but this book is definitely one of the better books that I have purchased.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
