Customer Reviews

Web Application Architecture: Principles, Protocols and Practices

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Have to disagree with prior reviewer's complaint that the book doesn't cover Java EE 5. It's not supposed to, it's not a Java book, it's a book on the principles and protocols of web application development. Authors say upfront they don't focus on a specific API, toolkit, or framework. They cover HTTP, XML and HTML through HTML5, core protocols and languages of the web. In discussing server-side web application frameworks and client-side techniques using Javascript and Ajax, they have an agnostic attitude that doesn't endorse one approach. Instead they survey the many available options contrasting their benefits and shortcomings. The end result is that you learn what all approaches have in common, reliance on underlying standard protcols. The new material improves on what was already a great text book. Coverage of new frameworks since the last edition has been added. Two new chapters on search engines and on Javascript/Ajax are excellent. The administrative interface sample application is the most objective tutorial on Rails I've read. There's also expanded coverage of semantic web and web services, both SOAP and REST.

This book gives a great overview of web concepts and how they relate to each other. It goes into enough technical detail to describe the concept, but doesn't get bogged down in technical details. I am recommending this book to experienced members of my team to establish a strong foundation of web concepts.

I was fortunate enough to be an undergrad in college in the early to mid 90's when Internet was taking off. This gave me the opportunity to use the world wide web long before Internet access at home was commonplace. I've been involved with the web as a user since the early 1990's, and as a developer since the mid/late 1990's.

The first chapters of this book were a trip down memory lane for me, I remember scouring public FTP sites for open source/shareware/freeware software I could install on my PC at home, or even use on the Unix boxes of the university. I remember using telnet to connect to remote systems around campus. When the world wide web came around, I remember using the Mosaic browser being flabbergasted at how cool it all was.

Nowadays, a lot of web application developers never had the opportunity to use these earlier protocols that were commonplace before the world wide web took off. This book provides an overview of these protocols.

Additionally, in this day an age, we have several powerful IDE's, frameworks and libraries that make our lives easier when developing web applications. While these tools are a boon to productivity, in many cases these tools shield web application developers from what actually happens "behind the scenes".

The proliferation of these tools have caused a new generation of web developers that are not familiar with fundamentals such as the HTTP protocol, XML and even HTML and Javascript.

Shklar and Rosen present these fundamentals in a clear, concise way. After going through this book, web application developers will have enough knowledge to know what is going on behind all their IDE generated applications that rely on a bunch of libraries. They also compare several approaches to web application development, such as programmatic, template based, hybrids and frameworks.

The book has a lot of breadth and by necessity not a lot of depth, however it provides enough information for the reader to become sufficiently versed in these topics, should he/she ever need to dig down and see what is going on behind the scenes of the application being developed.

One minor complaint I have about the book is that the authors chose to use Struts 1 as their framework of choice for one of their case study application, Struts 1 is considered by many to be an obsolete framework. The authors also seem less than enthusiastic about JSF, which personally I have found to be a better, more intuitive framework than Struts. To their credit, JSF 2.0, which adds a lot of very nice features, was released around the same time this book was published.

This book covers a lot of ground, taking the reader logically and historically through the development of web technologies. The authors explain in a clear and coherent narrative the progression from web pages to web sites and into modern web applications. The book is more a survey than a cookbook. Examples are given at every step, but a lot of the details are left as an exercise for the reader. The book could serve as graduate-level reading to lay a groundwork for independent study.

The authors do not try to provide authoritative reference material for all the sundry topics, instead giving enough salient details to explain the reasons why we have the array of tools available today. They hold to a very determined balance of subject depth versus brevity, successfully maintaining the thread of their narrative throughout.

All the usual players are here: LAMP, DHTML, Ajax, XML (et. al.), PHP, SEO. While familiar with most of the material to some degree, I found the book filled in gaps in my understanding and illuminated connections that I had not considered before. The authors' approach of historically-informed, progressive development-- something akin to first principles-- provides a solid foundation for evaluating design choices and for continued learning after the book is finished.

Near the end, we are brought so up to date that clear choices no longer present themselves. Struts is presented next to Ruby on Rails and Java Server Faces and HTML5 are briefly discussed. Such are the vagaries of an active and developing field. This book can show us how we got to today, but at some point, the current edition will no longer carry you to the forefront, nor leave you confident and comfortable with current production systems. Still, it's value will hold for the foundation it provides and the approach to thinking about further developments.

This book has a lot good information but I was disappointed that there wasn't more information about Java EE 5, EJB 3.0 and the Java Persistence API. The book only barley mentions them.