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J2EE Design Patterns
If you are working on frameworks, integration projects or system components, it is my belief that you'll almost certainly pick up some ideas from this book. J2EE Design Patterns is organized according to the different layers that you might find in a multi-tier architecture: presentation, business, database, messaging, and others. Consequently, if you're a JSP developer on a project team, youll be able to get some ideas for how to organize your work as well as how to interface it with, for example, controllers, if you're following an MVC framework. Or, if you're integrating various distributed non-Java systems, you'll want to read the chapters on Business Tier Interfaces and Enterprise Concurrency.
Judging by my friends' bookshelves, another popular Java patterns book is Core J2EE Patterns. If you already own this book, you will find that this new offering from O'Reilly doesn't contain as many patterns per se, but seems to go into a greater level of detail describing each pattern and supplementing it with more code samples. A nice feature of the O'Reilly book is that each pattern gets ample coverage in enough detail for you to understand the actual problem, the causes and -- equally importantly -- how to put a solution into place. Each pattern is described using some UML notation and code samples (Chapter 2 contains a UML primer).
One of the problems that I've encountered reading books on the subject is that some steer so deeply into abstraction that they become hard to understand. Others are so stylistically repetitive that trying to read them becomes mind numbing. Fortunately, neither problem surfaced during the time that I spent reading this book. The authors avoided the visual repetition of the traditional Problem / UML / Goal / Actors format that other books follow by moving this type of description into an appendix. That lets the body of the book flow more easily and also supplies the reader with a handy quick reference in the back pages.
Do I have any complaints? Well, this book certainly doesn't suffer from any fatal flaws. But it seems that an acknowledgement of the popularity of certain components could have been included. For example, while specific MVC frameworks, like the ubiquitous Struts, were mentioned, Object-Relational mappers were not; I read some of the chapters and winced at the code samples that manipulated SQL strings and felt grateful that I'm using the wonderful Hibernate O/R mapping engine. Of course, for various reasons, some readers won't be able to use tools like these, and a book about patterns has to maintain a certain level of abstraction in order to maintain any lasting credibility. But the section on Object-Relational Mapping doesnt even mention that a class of tools exists without the use of EJB CMP (Container Managed Persistence). Thats a real shame, because manually moving data from the object world to the relational world and vice versa is time-consuming and error-prone (and frequently unnecessary) work.
It's a good book, with 285 pages of text and 53 pages of appendices. I've owned it for four days, and I've already managed to steal some of these ideas for the projects I'm working on.
Philip Jacob works for Eyeglasses.com. You can purchase J2EE Design Patterns from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
hello room
first post!
Cram it you nit!
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J2EE, huh? Sounds suspiciously like J2E2, the cousin of R2D2 that ratted to the Empire about his where abouts...
"Democrats criticized the President for attacking the terrorists."
Be patriotic, impeach the Liars.
Thank you and a Happy Thanksgiving,
Kilgore Trout
Mark my words. Blood will flow.
After all, it's been "one nation under God" since 1950s when the reference to God was sneaked in to the pledge our kids are made to recite. Why not follow the course to the end and just call it "mission accomplished"?
Vote out GWB in 2004. I don't care if you're Republican, Democrat or something else. That is your PATRIOTIC duty.
You obviously suffer from the same malady as the
fearful "leader" as evidenced by this logic:
"See, free nations are peaceful nations. Free nations don't attack each other. Free nations don't develop weapons of mass destruction.
--- George W. Bush--- Milwaukee, Wis., Oct. 3, 2003
Unfortunately, many alleged "patriots", such as you, are both illiterate and innumerate, as evidenced by your uncritical consumption of propaganda from the U.S. media and BushCo.
As always,
Kilgore Trout