Customer Reviews

Web Application Architecture: Principles, Protocols and Practices

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is an ideal text for providing intermediate-level web developers with a solid grounding in architectural principles and more advanced techniques. Before going into why I like this book I do want to offer one caveat - the authors' approach is towards the Model-View-Controller paradigm, and is based on Java Standard Tag Library, Jarkata struts and Apache. These are solid elements, but if you are working in a different environment you will not appreciate this book as much.

The historical material in this book is not fluff if you approach it with the intent to gain a fuller understanding of the major components of the Internet and web. This material is rich with details about why the core web technologies developed and evolved, including design choices the pioneers made in the face of constraints. In a subtle way this part of the book is a primer on design and architecture.

What makes this book so valuable is the non-trivial application that brings this book alive. This is a refreshing change from other books that use thinly contrived snippets of code or trivial applications. The code for this application can be downloaded from the book's supporting web site, which also contains errata (thus far there are only two entries), and articles that are valuable resources with or without this book.

Overall this is one of the better books on web application design and development, and one that dives into code and technical details.

I have to disagree with the reviewer who disparaged this book's emphasis on history. The background on TCP/IP protocols explained how HTTP came to be and why servers and browsers work the way they do. Discussion of how web development platforms evolved provided insight into the problems newer approaches tried to solve and the problems some of them created. The authors may have gone overboard spouting the merits of "separating content from presentation" and touting the praises of MVC approaches, but their point is a valid one you can really relate to if you've worked with page-centric platforms like ASP and JSP. The historical review of different approaches explained the authors' reasons for ultimately choosing an MVC approach with Struts and JSTL, and offered insights into how development platforms may evolve in the future. This is a book that starts with basics and builds on them, covering protocols, markup languages, and development platforms. The history helps drive the points home. Personally, I learned a lot from this book. I agree that they could have provided a CD-ROM, but it turns out their website (webappbuilders.com) is pretty good and has other good info aside from the app's source code, including some articles from the authors.

I am not an expert developer but I have a fair amount of experience building financial applications in Java and C++. I spent quite some time looking for a book that would get me started with Web technologies. It is not easy. Yes, there are many books that describe one or another technology but I wanted to find one that puts these technologies in prospective. I was very pleased when I found this book. I can always dig deeper in one direction when I need to but this book helps me to understand how to get started and where to concentrate my efforts. I like it, I think it is very useful.

I'm really impressed by the diverse coverage in this book, from e-mail protocols, HTTP transactions, server and browser architecture, XML and XSLT, to best practices for web application development. I've seen too many hodgepodge books on web application development that try to cover a broad range of topics that are slapped together haphazardly. This book has a well-defined learning path and a consistent style throughout, doing justice to each topic covered and tying all the information together cohesively. They say it's not supposed to be a tutorial on Struts, but the chapter for the book's sample application is better than many dedicated Struts tutorials. It explains clearly why MVC approaches are better than code-focused platforms like ASP, .NET, PHP, and JSP Model 1 -- because those approaches don't divide component responsibilities appropriately. The chapters on browser and server architecture explain the processing flow of HTTP requests and responses better than any other book I've seen, and the figures are quite helpful.

I've been writing Windows-based mutlimedia applications since Windows 95 was released. I've been looking for a good book to help the crossover to web application development, and I found that this was just the ticket. Explanations were solid and presented in a way that made experimentation easy (both from the browser and server side). Quite simply, this book served as a great jumping off point for deeper exploration into session management, security, web services (both SOAP and Rest), etc. Definitely a great introduction for folks with a software engineering background.

In my career as a web developer, I had to pick up most of the material compiled in this book anyway I could, whether it was HTTP protocols or web server configuration, or Cold Fusion and PHP. This book seems to be two things: 1. a textbook for learning web application development from the ground up, including HTTP, HTML, XML and XSLT, and 2. a survey of the options available to web developers, starting with CGI up to today's frameworks, explaining the advantages and shortcomings of each approach. As the former, I imagine it would work very well as the text for a college course on this subject. As the latter, I can only say that it works very well for me. I wish I had it during my last project: the explanations for why some approaches are ultimately better than others might have saved us all a lot of headache in the long run. It's a good reference even for seasoned developers. The explanations of the meanings of various esoteric HTTP headers in the context of server and browser architecture, and the sections on best practices for building scalable extensible web apps have come in very handy.

When I first saw this book I looked at the Table of Contents and thought: who is it for? Isn't it a bit too broad? It's not a book about any specific approach to web development. It turned out that was exactly what our team needed. We're a shop with Perl CGI, Cold Fusion and ASP, and we're migrating to servlets and JSP. We knew what we knew, but stumbled as we tried to learn the new technology. Instead of giving us tunnel vision about one particular approach, this book explained what different approaches have in common and how knowledge about one can be transfered to another. We keep a library of books for the team to use, and the books that are always out are the Dynamic HTML Definitive Guide and this one. A great investment!

The information in this book is very good and it does cover a lot of ground, but it's overly heavy on the history of the web and internet. The first few chapters on internet protocols and web servers and browsers were great, but by the time we get to markup languages, we get a truckload of detail about SGML as the forerunner of HTML. How many people outside maybe the publishing industry care about or need to know about HTML's historical roots in SGML?

Once we get past that and go into DHTML and XML, things start picking up again. The XML chapter is also excellent, I learned a lot from it, but the chapter on "Dynamic Web Applications" is somewhat undirected and goes off on tangents. The best thing about this chapter though is the Best Practices summary that concludes each section. The next chapter may be good if you're looking to compare and contrast different platforms like CGI, servlets, Cold Fusion, and ASP, but they don't go into enough detail about any of these platforms.

Eventually they do go into depth about Struts as they use it to build their sample application. The application they provide is quite nice, illustrating their best practices in web application design. But why couldn't a CDROM be provided with the source, instead of sending us to a web site?

Overall the book has a lot of good material but it could be organized better. Hopefully a future edition will resolve many of these issues, because a book like this that covers web application architecture from A to Z is sorely needed. Less emphasis on the historical, more on the practical please.

I always thought Amazon search is good but I stumbled upon this book at a store. It's a useful summary, but not a reference. I particularly like the examples and the way they build up from trivial to complex. The level of detail is right. Altogether, very refreshing.

This book is a good book for those with mimimal knowledge of web technologies. For the expert I would not recommend it. However it is an easy read