Customer Reviews

Professional J2EE Programming with BEA WebLogic Server

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

I'm sorry to say that I was really disappointed with this book. Since I have been using Weblogic 5.1 to build enterprise applications, I was really counting on some insight from a book written by two BEA insiders. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing apparently incorrect about the book, I just was looking for more than I could find in the Weblogic documentation or the BEA newsgroups.

If you look at the BEA newsgroups, there are many people asking questions about such things as why the message "Attempt to sendMsg using a closed connection" happens and what can be done about it. More information on issues of how the server attempts to clean up remote clients using the DGC for example, would have made this a better book. I'm sure for people starting out with Weblogic, any book that adds to the documentation for Weblogic is a plus, but to focus so much on the web-tier was disappointing. I was really looking for an in-depth book on how Weblogic implements the EJB/J2EE specification. I do think that the stress-testing chapters were of benefit though.

The other thing that I must say is that I'm all for using a constant example through a book to help the reader conceptualize a problem. The problem is that the tone that this book took was really annoying. On page 204 in the "Controversy" section, does this add any real value to the learning process of Weblogic? I understand that there is controversy in almost any decision in a development shop; it's part of the job. What value does it add here in a Weblogic book? It seems to me to add no value except for adding to the page count. This style of taking an example with a group called the "Wonder Troops" does nothing but annoy me. Readers know it's a fictitious company and don't really buy into the problem they are experiencing. This really doesn't help me understand the technology any better.

Having said all of that, I still applaud the two authors for putting a good beginning book out on a subject that needed more information. I was just hoping for so much more. I think that if you having been using Weblogic 5.1 for any length of time, you probably won't learn a great deal.

It is unbelievable how irrelevant this book is to BEA WebLogic. If you expect a solid introduction to J2EE and WebLogic, you'll have to look elsewhere. I see another book on this topic is due out in June...hopefully it will fill the void that this book leaves.

There seems to be quite a bit of variance in the opinions of this book, so let me see if I can clear things up. The term "professional" in the title may mislead those of you who are already developing with J2EE and want to enhance your skills or gain some knowledge of Weblogic Server. If this is the case, I would suggest the wealth of excellent documentation on the BEA site instead of this book.

I am a "professional" Java developer who is migrating into the world of enterprise applications. If you are in my situation, this book is a MUST HAVE. I was able to blow through it in a weekend and gained a solid foundation while doing so. Plus, I was able to do it with Weblogic (most other books use Tomcat or some other inferior product).

In short, if you are experienced with J2EE, this book is not for you. However, if you are an advanced Java developer who has not yet written enterprise web apps, get this book before you start!

The first reviewer gave this book two stars. I think this was too harsh. There is some good information in the book and as far as technical books go, getting "some good information" is about all you can ask.

I'm not a professional reviewer, just a reader of these types of books, so YMMV this review.

I thought Chapter 1, "Webifying Applications" was well written and informative. The same is true for Chapters 2 and 3, Setting the Scene - Pizzas to Go & Creating a Web Front End. The middle chapters are good general Java references EJB, JSP, JMI, and the other standard web-buzz of today. One thing I liked was the fact that the web-buzz was illustrated with an application example, Pizza2Go. At least this puts the architectual pieces in context, a lot of books on the same subject have zero practical context.

Chapter 9, "The Wireless Pizza" is a good practice guide to WAP and other wireless-buzz which I found helpful. Also, Chapter 10 and 11 devote a lot of pages to stress testing and grinding the servers for optimizing the configuration of the servers. This is good tutorial information that I've not found in other books.

The security chapter was a little too weak and covered only SSL and other first-generation web security methods. I've heard from others that this is a common weakness in the BEA architecture but do not have first hand knowledge of this buzz.

Overall the book is useful and the two stars by the first reviewer was too harsh. My four stars may be to kind, but I tend to buy a lot of technical books and if I can get a few good nuggets from each one, I'm happy. There are plenty of nuggets here and having a practical BEA Weblogic perspective is useful.

...

please don't waste your money on this one. it is poorly written. it is outdated with the release of weblogic 6.0. the worst about this book is that all the examples are badly designed and implemented. it tells you the wrong way of program web applications.

The words "A Case Study" added to the title of this book would more clearly explain what this book is about. This book doesn't really work as a stand-alone introduction to J2EE development but should be thought of as a companion to your favorite J2EE book. The premise of the book is a case study of an imaginary company (Pizza2Go) which wishes to take its current applications and migrate them to a J2EE internet application. The migration goes through stages as the developers first move to JSPs and servlets followed by the edition of various Enterprise JavaBeans. Following sections include integrating a J2EE application with an ASP application, messaging using JMS, and adapting an application to handle wireless devices. The last section discusses how to thoroughly test your application including stress testing. The case study is the heart of the book and is both the book's strength and its weakness. The book features an enormous amount of code but in some places little discussion of that code. Without some knowledge of servlets, JSPs, and J2EE this book would be difficult to follow. However, if your complaint about other books is that the examples are too simplistic or not realistic then this book may be just what you want. Although the book does discuss topics within BEA WebLogic Server, there is little if anything that can not be adapted to any J2EE server. Overall, I found this book to be a very helpful and interesting case study.

Inspite of the poor "track record" of the book , I decided to buy this hoping that I could get something out of it. But it does not cover anything about weblogic. Apart from the fact the book is not about Weblogic , the examples are poor, there are no mention about WEB applications, .war/ear files and gives no useful information. If one want to learn about the J2EE APIs, there are much better books in the market. The one star is for the chapters about security and clustering. One the whole, I wasted time returning it to the post office. I wonder why nobody has sued the authors for giving the wrong title.

After reading the other reviews here on Amazon.com (many "one stars"), I decided not to buy the book. But I saw it in a book store and picked it up out of curiosity... and did not put it down until I had walked out the door having purchased it. I have purchased and read scores of computer books over the past ten years, this is one of the best I have come across. It thoroughly covers both specifics about the product as well as general principles of J2EE (JMS, JNDI, all types of EJB's, XML, WAP). Its chapters on testing are also well done, providing a solid framework. Having only read the book, I walked straight into an architecture level job on WebLogic and have been successful. I have also been able to evaluate two complex JMS systems, also having only this book as background. A great knowledge/time investment.

Last week I downloaded the book's source code and got it to work within 15 minutes. This morning I finally had a chance to read it. Great stuff! It is true to the title by focusing on things that are WebLogic-specific (like it or not, it is the market leader by a wide margin in the app servers space). This book is an excellent companion to the other new book by Wrox, Professional Java Server J2EE Edition.

Having experience with servlets, JSP's and JDBC, and eager to take a plunge into EJB but don't know how? Skeptical about the performance ramifications of moving to EJB's? Wondering how to migrate business logic from PL/SQL stored procedures to session beans? Unsure about whether to use session beans or entity beans to access data? Trying to dedicde which database tables to model as entity beans? Thinking to maximize the performance of entity beans? You find answers to all the above questions and more in this book. Every chapter is heavy-duty, and there is hardly any fluff in it. The whole book evolves around an integrated e-commerce (Pizzas2Go) application, which grew from a straight forward servlets/JSP/JDBC app into a full-blown JSP/EJB/JMS/WAP app, with clear explanation of the design patterns and migration path. This is very helpful to IT shops who are at various stages of adopting the J2EE standards. The final chapters on performance testing in a stand-alone and clustered server environment are enormously informative.

Having read all EJB related titles published in the last 12 to 15 months, I waste no time here in recommending this book to anyone currently doing or thinking of doing EJB work using WebLogic.

Don't waste a dime of your money on this book. Don't be fooled by the title, it gives little to no help in developing/deploying/administering weblogic. This book is poorly written and the examples are poorly designed and pretty much worthless. There are much better sources for J2EE development and Weblogic.