Professional WebObjects with Java [Paperback]

Thomas Termini (Author), Pierce Wetter (Author), Ben Galbraith (Author), Jim Roepcke (Author), Pero Maric (Author), John Hopkins (Author), Josh Flowers (Author), Daniel Steinberg (Author), Max Muller (Author), Michael DeMann (Author), Bernard Scholz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 2001

WebObjects 5 is the powerful new release of Apple's award-winning application server, built from the ground up in Java. This allows WebObjects to run on virtually any server making it easily accessible to millions of Java programmers. WebObjects also integrates with other Java-based solutions such as EJB containers, servlets, ORBs, and web services.

The combination of a Java runtime with advanced native tools for Mac OS X and Windows 2000 makes WebObjects an obvious environment for customers needing rapid development of flexible, scalable web applications.

This book provides a comprehensive roadmap to application development and serving with WebObjects by taking you step-by-step through a careful balance of examples and explanations of theory. When you are finished, you will be able to create dynamic applications that allow users to find, view, and modify data from back-end databases, accessible in any browser.

This book covers:

Complete guide to installing and using WebObjects 5.0
Multi-platform approach, for WebObjects running on either Mac OS X or Windows 2000
Comprehensive tour of WebObject's application development tools
Creating WebObjects components
Object-relational mapping to databases using the Enterprise Object Framework
Advanced features including Direct To Web and Java Client
Practical worked examples throughout, including a detailed case study

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

You will get the most from this book if you are an experienced Java software developer with an interest in building sophisticated, database-driven web application using WebObjects. Apple has applied all their graphical user interface expertise to make using WebObjects pretty straightforward, but to unlock its potential, a thorough understanding of Java is needed.

About the Author

Thomas Termini, Pierce Wetter, Ben Galbraith, Jim Roepcke, Pero Maric, John Hopkins, Josh Flowers, Daniel Steinberg, Max Muller, Michael DeMann, Bernhard Scholz, Gustavo Frederico, Douglas Bergere.

Thomas Termini is a founder and managing director of BlueDog Inc.Thomas has been a NeXT and Apple developer since 1990, with clients from the World Bank, the U.S. government, Volkswagen of America, among others.Prior to that Pierce worked as a WebObjects consultant for companies like Apple and Time/Warner.

Ben Galbraith was hired by a Silicon Valley computer manufacturer to develop Windows-based client-server applications. After some years as an Internet consultant, he now leads the Java development team at an insurance company. He regularly lectures, evangelises and gives classes on Java technology.

Jim Roepcke is an experienced WebObjects developer currently experiencing WO nirvana at NetStruxr. Having lost much hair fighting with Active Server Pages in his early years developing web applications, Jim appreciates the refreshingly sane approach WebObjects takes.

Pero Maric has been working with WebObjects since version 4.0 and has been developing Java applications since 1997. Currently he is a Technical support lead at Montage.DMC, where he mentors and assists team members in providing support for WebObjects applications at Nortel Networks.

John Hopkins has taught classes in Java and XML, he's wrote for the company newsletter on programming and mathematics, and wrote a case study for Java Report. John is studying current and upcoming XML and peer-to-peer computing technologies for virtual supercomputing and cycle selling projects.

Daniel Steinberg is the Director of Java Offerings for Dim Sum Thinking in Cleveland, Ohio. He has covered Java on the Mac for the last five years for JavaWorld magazine, writes a monthly column for the O'Reilly Mac DevCenter, and is a regular contributor for IBM's developerWorks.

Max Muller currently works at NetStruxr. He has become an outspoken advocate of building template and rule based user interfaces with WebObjects. Max has also written articles for online publication Stepwise as well as giving presentations at the Bay Area Next Group.

Michael DeMan is a senior consulting engineer specializing in enterprise software development and systems integration. Michael is the founder of Gemini Solutions, Inc, and also co-founded the Pattern Research Foundation. Michael can be reached at [e-mail].

Product Details

• Paperback: 500 pages
• Publisher: Peer Information; 1st edition (October 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1861004311
• ISBN-13: 978-1861004314
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 7.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,322,083 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent WebObjects Book, November 16, 2001

By 

Scott Anguish - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Professional WebObjects with Java (Paperback)

I've been using WebObjects for several years now (since pre-1.0 days) and this is a terrific addition to my reference material. The authors are well known WebObjects developers, and have an excellent grasp on the topic.

The chapters on the DirectToWeb technology are worth the price of the book alone. Direct2Web allows you to provide substantial functionality without writing large amounts of code. This book has the only DirectToWeb tutorials that I'm aware of other than an article by Max Muller (one of the authors of this book) which was published on Stepwise.com.

The DirectToJava coverage could have been more extensive (read that as more chapters... more coverage) but the one tutorial is certainly a good introduction of what is possible with that technology..

Another strong point about this book is that it covers the released version of WebObjects 5.0 for Java, not a beta version... and both Mac OS X and Windows development environments are given equal space.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Poorly executed, March 1, 2002

By 

Jeffrey A. Schmitz (Albuquerque, NM United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Professional WebObjects with Java (Paperback)

While this book COULD be very good, as the information it tries to convey is useful, it was written as though the authors had other things to do and couldn't spend any time on "readability" issues. There are many grammatical errors and words simply left out or juxtaposed which makes reading what is already fairly complex information that much harder. Perhaps this book suffers from the too many cooks syndrome.

Here is an example of bad grammer:
"A solution to this problem is to increase the adaptor timeout value to a value higher than 30 seconds. This requires in order to come up with a permanent solution"

After a few re-reads I figured out that simply changing the adaptor timeout value does NOT require modificaions of the application logic, etc. If they only would have started the first sentence "A temporary solution to..." and started the second sentence, "A more permanent solution requires... " it would have made a world of difference, although the phrase "modificaitons of the application logic, web server or database tuning" is still confusing. Do you need to modify, or tune the web server?

Here's another example a couple pages later:
"Each entry will have useful statistics about each application instance such as port numbers, unique instance number."

The authors should realize how sentences like these can really drain your time and energy when you are trying to understand things, but apparently they don't because these types of sentences show up a LOT.

I also echo another reviewer's thought that the book seems to meander from subject to subject with no real flow which doesn't help readability either.

That being said, there is still some good info to be found in this book once you decipher it. And that fact that there isn't much competition is why I gave it 3 stars. It's just a shame that they didn't want to put in the effort to get the "little" things right.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great WO Resource, December 1, 2001

By 

Michael Clark (Richmind Hill, Ontario, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Professional WebObjects with Java (Paperback)

I started coding WO almost 2 years ago now and I sure wish I had this book sitting on my shelf when I started! To be honest I have not read this book from cover to cover, but I did browse all the chapters and the earlier chapters would have turned on the light bulb a lot quicker for me when starting out.

Having said that, this book is not limited to beginners. I have recently started the process of learning DirectToWeb and this book has already paid for itself with just the couple of D2W chapters there are. These chapters are especially important because D2W documentation is sorely lacking in the WO world.

A must have for any WO developers shelf.