Pro Jakarta Velocity: From Professional to Expert (Paperback)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: using velocity, action listener, resource loader class, Hello World, Creating Web Applications, Creating Stand-Alone Applications (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

I can strongly recommend this book for anyone interested in Velocity. For anyone not interested in Velocity…why not?</a></p> </blockquote> <p id="quoteAuthor">&#8212; Thomas Paul, JavaRanch Sheriff</p></div>

<p>Nearly any application you build requires some form of output. And the output format may change on a regular basis&emdash;which can lead to a heavy maintenance burden and a restrictive test cycle. But by utilizing the power of the Velocity template engine, you can integrate templated output into your application, decoupling the application logic from the output format. </p>

<p><i>Pro Jakarta Velocity: From Professional to Expert</i> leads leads you immediately toward configuration and setup, all the way to full-blown application development. This is not merely a book about web development&emdash;as the multipurpose Velocity does more than replace JSP. Instead, this book demonstrates many of these alternative Velocity uses. This in-depth book also shows you how to integrate Velocity development and use it with other open-source frameworks and tools such as Spring and Apache Struts.</p>

About the Author

Rob Harrop is a software consultant specializing in delivering high-performance, highly-scalable enterprise applications. He is an experienced architect with a particular flair for understanding and solving complex design issues. With a thorough knowledge of both Java and .NET, Harrop has successfully deployed projects across both platforms. He also has extensive experience across a variety of sectors, retail and government in particular.</p>

<p>Harrop is the author of five books, including <i>Pro Spring</i>, a widely-acclaimed, comprehensive resource on the Spring Framework.</p>

<p>Harrop has been a core developer of the Spring Framework since June 2004 and currently leads the JMX and AOP efforts.Rob is a member of the JCP and is involved in the JSR-255 Expert Group for JMX 2.0.</p>

Product Details

• Paperback: 370 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (August 30, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 159059410X
• ISBN-13: 978-1590594100
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #415,500 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Possibly better than JSPs?, October 1, 2004

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

Harrop puts forth an interesting claim in his book. He offers Velocity as a significant improvement over using JSPs to make dynamic web pages. By now, at least in the Java world, JSPs in combination with servlets, is the most common way to do this. Not the least because it gives a clear implementation of the MVC design pattern.

But Harrop points out that JSPs always had an awkward syntax. Which for complex pages leads to miserable, error-prone coding. Plus, the pages might be slow to build. Velocity seems to offer a coding approach that is more natural than JSPs. And you certainly don't have to abandon MVC. Harrops shows how to reimplement MVC, while using Velocity and hooking to a database, and coupled to Struts and Spring.

The code examples in the book are not complicated. That too is part of his message.

You may want to look closer at the book.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Complete coverage of Velocity, November 24, 2004

By	Thomas Paul (Plainview, NY USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I have always been a strong supporter of Velocity. I even wrote an article for JavaRanch about Velocity back in March. Velocity is an open source template framework designed to simplify the task of generating content such as web pages, email, or any other text-based output. The Velocity documentation available from Apache is short, low on examples, and leaves holes (even if it is fairly good compared to some other open source projects). This book fills in the gaps and gives excellent coverage of the many features that are available with Velocity.

The book starts with an introduction to Velocity and then explains how to install and configure it. The author then discusses the Velocity Template Language, examines its shortcomings, and demonstrates how to get around them. Best practices are covered early in the book. Although Velocity is normally thought of as a web-based framework, the author doesn't let us forget that it can be used for both stand-alone and web applications and gives us detailed chapters on both. Velocity tools are well covered including Anakia, which can be used to transform XML. The Velocity architecture is explained as well as ways to extend that architecture.

The examples are well thought out and give good coverage of the features of Velocity. The most interesting part of the examples is how little work it is to integrate Velocity into a well-designed framework. The author shows how Velocity fits into both Struts and Spring, demonstrating that Velocity is not meant to replace these frameworks but rather to simplify content generation in any framework. I can strongly recommend this book for anyone interested in Velocity. For anyone not interested in Velocity, the question is, why not?

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Missing a lot, February 13, 2006

By	A. S. Johnson "seeking change" (Anchorage, AK) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I am using this book to bring myself up to speed on a project that combines Velocity with Struts. I'm working with Struts and Velocity modules built by a consulting company. Before the project, I didn't know either one. Now I am in the middle of the project and somewhat familiar with both. Most of the velocity commands I am able to figure out pretty quickly without the book, which is good because every time I try to find something ($link.setAction for example, which is needed to obtain the URL for forwarding) it's not there. Maybe I'm missing something, but if I am, it also is not identified in this book. I'm doing much better by referring to my Struts reference(Programming Jakarta Struts) and searching the web.