Customer Reviews

Spring Persistence -- A Running Start

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This is a nice little book that covers the persistence component of Spring very well. I did find that there was a lot of assumed Spring knowledge, so I would suggest some other supporting books if you are new to Spring.

The discussion moves quickly, without much detail about supporting technologies. In summary, I would recommend this book, but strongly recommend that you be familiar with Spring concepts before starting.

I read this book cover to cover and did not skip over anything. The authors did a good job and a thoughtful job, and I am much the better for having taken ten or so hours to learn from them.

However, this book only made sense to me because I came to it with prior knowledge of Java generics, java annotations, Hibernate, Spring, Groovy/Grails, and Roo. Without a prior background in all the book's subjects it would have been difficult to understand to the point of maybe not even being worth the effort of trying.

The book had an excellent section on Lucene that was very interesting and well written. The chapter on Groovy/Grails was my favorite chapter. The final chapter on ROO seemed a bit forced in its optimistic outlook in the face of ROO 1.1.M1's inability to support LOBs and JPA domain object inheritance, but at least the authors put on a game face and managed to make the chapter have a point of view and not seem too dry. I very much enjoyed the excellent sections about caching and lazy loading in chapter 9 .

For me the two biggest shortcomings were that JPA/Hibernate/Spring was interspersed with non-JPA/Hibernate/Spring in such a way that I had trouble remembering at times what was JPA specific and what was non-JPA specific. For me a second shortcoming was that the book did not explain/review some basic Hibernate concepts concerning "bags", "sets", "maps", and "lists".

In summary, the book is an excellent investment of time to read but only for those who have enough of a prior background in the subject matter. It is going to be necessary to read other books on the same subjects to fill in a lot of gaps. The book is good enough to merit starting all over again on page one and reading it cover to cover a second time.

Persistence is a necessary evil in creating applications that enable user interaction. Using Spring makes dealing with persistence much easier but there is the configurations that get everything starting which confuses some new to the framework. The book Spring Persistence: A Running Start is a quick overview on how to get the most common persistence types setup and running with a minimal effort. I liked the breakout by chapter for each persistence style. The book covers the basics of why to separate your application into layers to break the dependencies, JDBC, Hibernate and JPA, IBatis then some transaction and testing. Lastly it covers a little of Groovy and Grails. This book which is aptly named gives a person with little or no experience integrating persistence into a Spring application a Running Start with good examples of configurations to get the basics going. From there the user needs to work on their own, or consult with a more advanced reference or find the information on the web. I would have liked to see a more in depth coverage about the various types of persistence technologies and more advanced examples. Not all the time do we get to deal with easy database scenarios as in the provided examples. Many times we need to work with legacy databases that were not built with ORM friendly tables. This book does what it comes to do but I feel that there is an audience for more advanced but just as focused books on the Spring layers. I come away from reading this book with a since of knowing more about some of the persistence types that I have not dealt with yet but I feel that I want more. I recommend this book for anyone new to Spring or someone that needs to start using another ORM type like Hibernate or IBatis.

Book Review: Spring Persistence: A Running Start

Author: Paul Tepper Fisher and Solomon Duskis

Publisher: Apress Inc

ISBN: 978-1-4302-1878-4