Customer Reviews

Professional Struts Applications: Building Web Sites with Struts ObjectRelational Bridge, Lucene, and Velocity (Expert's Voice)

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

 

 

The first chapter of this book provides an amazingly well thought out conceptual presentation of 6 antipatterns (counter-productive/negative design patterns) common to web application architecture. As a web developer for the past 5 years this chapter was incredibly insightful for me. The author definitely has very extensive experience with the topic.

The remainder of the book focuses of the application of struts and other jakarta projects to successfully avoid the previously discussed antipatterns. To accomplish this the book provides a fully functional, downloadable companion application (downloaded from the wrox website). The power in this is that it provides for a very interractive teaching method... by example. This was far superior to the majority of other books I have read which provide only small non-cohesive code tidbits scattered throughout the text.

Reading this book has allowed me to go from having only a limited knowledge about jakarta, to being somewhat confident with implementing a basic web application utilizing jakarta projects including struts and applying j2ee design patterns.

You must be familiar with servlets, jsp, and tomcat (or another servlet container) prior to reading and applying this book. It is definitely not for a j2ee novice.

My only complaint about this book is the number of typos and errors in the text. I have found countless errors in the text and diagrams which have at times made understanding it difficult. Most of these are not even listed on the errata section of the book's website.

This book is a reprint of a Wrox book that APress bought when Wrox went out of business. Although the book has a publication date of September 2003, it was actually published by Wrox earlier in the year. Also, APress intends on releasing a second edition of this book (ISBN:159059228X) in December 2003. With that in mind, let's discuss the contents of this book.

The book is broken up into five sections. The first and longest section discusses Struts. This section is very good as it concentrates on developing a Struts application and demonstrates good design while discussing the issues that make bad designs bad. This section ends with a look at using ObjectRelationalBridge (OJB) as a data access tier. Unfortunately the book uses an beta version of OJB (it is still not in release) that makes this section obsolete. The remaining chapters cover other open source tools available to developers including Velocity (template engine), Lucene (search engine), and Ant (build tool). Although it is interesting to see how each tool integrates into the Struts application developed earlier, the chapters are not long enough to give detailed information on any of these tools.

The conclusion is that if you are looking for a book on properly building a Struts application, you probably want to wait for the second edition. Since the OJB chapter is obsolete and the chapters on the other tools are fairly brief, this book doesn't provide anything that shouts, "Buy Me" from the shelves.

Since software moves quickly, some aspects of the book are already out of date even though it's only a matter of months old. The template tags are already deprecated in favor of the new tile tags and the Object Relational Bridge stuff has changed quite a bit (which is to be expected if you consider it wasn't even version 1 for OJB). I'm glad there's books on these topics in any case.

The first chapter is a nice read and while it's covered everywhere else, they cover MVC well and how it relates to the struts framework.

My biggest pet peeve is with one of what is otherwise their most useful chapter on prepopulating forms and setting forms up. In chapter 2 they talk about the concepts of pre and post setup actions (post as in after). Then in chapter 3 they use a PostStory example (post as in posting an ad, but then again it could be like the post form submit method). They have a PostStorySetupAction and with all the meanings of posts I had trouble not seeing it as an after[post]-before[setup] action. My brain core dumped and in the end I went back with a pen and marked out "post" everywhere in the chapter. If only they could have used AddStory or CreateStory, or I could forget the other overloaded meanings of post I wouldn't have had to reread that chapter.

The one time the book came to the rescue was when trying to mix the validator framework validation with custom validation. extending the ValidatorForm instead of ActionForm was exactly what we needed.

I found very rich Web application architecture material in this book. Struts is remarkably demonstrated as the direct application of five J2EE patterns present in Web development, and their counter-part you really want to be aware before starting any application plans, the six Web anti-patterns presented in the first Chapter.

These 6 Web anti-patterns are described in the way of a captivating analogy where Web applications are like patients showing symptoms, and where you get presented their respective solutions. First chapter is key to Struts, and the rest of the book builds upon this initial solid presentation. I recommend to avoid jump-starting at Chapter 2 and 3 the direct Struts content (what I just did originally..) Although still feasible to get up-and-running with essential Struts features, you would actually miss the essence of the book and probably the purpose of Struts.

Chapter 4 and 5 concretely elaborate beyond Strut features of the preceding chapters, they bring extremely valuable content on the best business logic and data access strategies that go along with the framework. That gave me great precision of all potential pitfalls that could show in Struts implementations, and the way to steer clear of them.

Reading is attractive. Efficient style punctuated with colorful dialectic pieces. I liked the "tribal mysticism" (in which 'many software architects love to enshroud patterns')! Content is well sized and pleasantly compartmented. Couple of typos, weren't an issue for me.

Great roadmap for advanced Web Application Development with Struts, great companion book!

As a non-programmer, I found this book to be clear, precise and easy to read. I highly recommend it to people interested in the subject matter, but lacking a technical background.

I too saw many editing errors, but these did not bother me. I've always kept a reference application working using different technologies. This book gave my existing reference application a real boost. I was able to easily integrate many more technologies using the combination of the JavaEdge application as well as the patterns discussed in the book. I thought the authors did a pretty darn good job discussing the patterns/antipatterns. Once I completed the read, I had a good enough overview of each of the technologies to do more in-depth study of each. The approach the authors took by bringing in all these technologies, which I feel work well together is a usefull 'pattern' for books these days; I encourage more like this. Had some challenges with getting the JavaEdge application to deploy/work, but was not too tough.

I returned this book. If you are familiar with Struts don't waste your time on this book. If you are learning Struts I recommend you try other works. As to the other technologies, such as OJB, this book does not cover them in enough depth to warrant a purchase.

Before you start coding, do some planning. The Struts and OJB frameworks are powerful, but a little complex. This book explains how they work. Of more value, though, is much needed discussion of how to use them effectively - to avoid antipatterns and misuse of the frameworks, and to use them to solve the right problems.

If you have decided to use Struts and OJB as foundations for your web app architecture, then I highly recommend this book.

While waiting for the book to arrive, I suggest going to http://....org/ for info on Struts, Lucene, and Velocity; and to http://.../ojb/ for OJB. Learn about how these frameworks work, and what they are used for. The book will then fill in lots of details, and provide best practices, etc.

I had a chance to attend one of John Carnell's sessions here in Chicago. I was very impressed with his presentation and the content. After that I bought the book and I am very impressed with the simplicity with which the content is presented.

This book summarizes Struts and some other technologies related. It can bring you to lot of save times in your beginnigs because It exposes a professional point of view front the use of these technologies and patterns. Not Struts beginners don't purcharse it.