Advanced J2EE Platform Development: Applying Integration Tier Patterns (Paperback)

~ Torbjörn Dahlén (Author), Thorbiörn Fritzon (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Enterprise applications, F. Scott Fitzgerald might have said if he had been a programmer, are not like ordinary software. He would have been right, too: Multi-tier applications are inherently more complex than traditional software, and are subject to their own special collection of bugbears. Advanced J2EE Platform Development explores the characteristics of real-world multi-tier software as implemented in Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE), delivering a warts-and-all picture of the development environment as it's used for tying together user interfaces, business logic, databases, and--unusually among J2EE books, which usually treat this last part as an afterthought--legacy systems such as mainframes. This is a useful, eminently practical guide to J2EE software design.

Torbjörn Dahlen and Thorbjörn Fritzon do the software-engineering community a favor by championing the idea of a common domain model--a standardized idea of business entities (customers, products, and employees, for example) that is shared across all software components. The idea is that such a model makes it easier to re-use software and to validate deliverables against specifications. The authors go into great detail on putting together meaningful entity relationship diagrams, translating them into software objects, and integrating the lot. They use case studies--complete with lots of code listings--extensively, taking a bank as an illustrative example. --David Wall

Topics covered: Good software design practices for J2EE, particularly in situations in which there is a need to integrate with legacy systems. The authors advocate a common domain model helps isolate J2EE objects from the peculiarities of legacy systems, and discuss other strategies for making a clean migration to J2EE.

Product Description

This book presents a powerful method that makes J2EE applications portable across any underlying Enterprise Information Systems so that are more resilient to change. It addresses the question of how to properly encapsulate legacy systems and make them usable on the Internet. The authors discuss methods and techniques to standardize the encapsulation process make the process more efficient, by producing an integration tier that effectively shields the J2EE part of an application from the properties and demands of its legacy part. The authors provide guidelines on how to reduce time and cost for application development by increasing re-use and quality and how to increase the migration potential for applications to provide a method to keep up with changes in the Enterprise Information System. This book shows how to apply Crupi 's Core J2EE Patterns to your organization's legacy systems that were not written in Java. Previously catalogued in 8/2002 catalog.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR (September 25, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0130449121
• ISBN-13: 978-0130449122
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,705,265 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good Assessment of EJB Scaling Limitations, October 13, 2003

By	W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Lives up to its title. Ideally suited for those of you already well-versed in UML and refactoring, though not necessarily in J2EE per se. If you have used legacy applications and have done some case studies of abstracting out the business logic with the idea of redeploying into a large multiuser web environment, then the book should have value to you. The patterns described herein may well be germane to your problems. Plus, going through some of the steps in identifying and implementing these patterns may have merit in and of themselves, quite separate from any particular pattern. Because in a complex development environment with participants from quite varied backgrounds, the sheer mass of detail can obscure the essential level of abstraction to usefully tackle the problem.

Think of it like this. Applying the book's methodology to your situation can be like setting an agenda for a meeting. Gives focus and discipline and, hopefully, an endpoint.

There is another cogent reason for the book to have merit to you. It discusses candidly the scaling limitations of using Enterprise Java Beans. This is an official Sun book. Earlier texts from Sun that I have read rarely point out any of the EJBs' problems. Perhaps when EJBs were first introduced, these were unknown. But several soon became apparent to developers. Unfortunately, in other Sun books, little of this is presented. You had to scan the newsgroups on the web to find out. Finally, we have it in "official" form.

4.0 out of 5 stars Concise Guide, June 25, 2005

By	James Kafka "James Kafka" (Columbia, SC) - See all my reviews

This book focuses on integrating J2EE with mainframe applications. The patterns described in the book demonstrate how to encapsulate an integration tier that shields the J2EE elements of an application from the legacy elements, so Java applications can take advantage of existing mainframe code.

The book goes through a real-life example by describing a banking integration project. With this example it describes the common integration patterns, DTO, DAO, Local Transaction Cache, etc. One of the major points the authors make is the benefit from having a common domain model across the enterprise. The common domain model will provide a consistent business data model across an enterprise for all users, so everyone in the organization will have a common vocabulary.

If you are a Java developer who is involved with integrating mainframe application this book is an excellent resource to have on the subject. This book is a concise and practical guide to enterprise integration.

1.0 out of 5 stars Lacks Context, May 13, 2004

By A Customer

Although Topic and overall structure of this book was not bad, but this book seriously lacks providing context.
Even worse, writers used common words too much without exact definition. (without explanation)

As a result, the story of book came to only writers's.
And maybe also to a member of their team...

Understanding this book is really hard.
Not because of difficulty, but because they dropped too much.

I really don't know how this book pass SUN TE certification.
If that certification process really happened. :-(