Apache Jakarta Commons

Simon P. Chappell writes "This is a hard review to write because I feel that I should be biased in favour of this book. I was one of the original reviewers of the book proposal. I read it and said "Yes, they'll be lining up around the block for a book like this!" Well, maybe those weren't my exact words, but I did offer my endorsement. After all, the Jakarta project of the Apache Software Foundation has an excellent reputation for quality Java code products and the Commons is quite the supply of diamonds in the rough. What could go wrong?" Read on for the rest of Chappell's review to find out. Apache Jakarta Commons - Reusable Java Components author Will Iverson pages 338 (8 page index) publisher Prentice Hall rating 4 reviewer Simon P. Chappell ISBN 0131478303 summary There are other books about the Jakarta Commons; buy one of those instead.

What's To Like

The book takes the reader on a journey through the Jakarta Commons. The Commons is like a massive utility library of Java code. Much of the code has been promoted out of the other Jakarta projects as it became more useful. One of the first such components was the Digester, which is a component to initialise a Java object from the contents of an XML configuration file. Very useful, originally from Struts and now used extensively by other Jakarta projects.

As the subject matter for a book, the Commons seems like a natural winner (I guess I have to say that!). There are so many components in the Commons that a guide to their types and usage does need to be available for developers.

Naturally, the book has a website to accompany it.

What's To Consider

Where to begin? I was actually surprised to find that I did not care for this book. The last review I wrote was for Mr. Iverson's very good Hibernate book. That was well written and structured. Unfortunately, this book feels kind of thrown together. The lack of care shows in the cramped layout and typesetting, the over-abundance of UML diagrams (a few here and there are great, but this felt like padding), code examples that can only be described as under-whelming and an approach that feels like an annotated telephone directory.

Despite the lack of quality of the primary chapters, they only actually account for the first 199 pages of the book. This is actually a very reasonable number of pages for a book, especially when you consider that classics like the first edition of Kernighan and Ritchie's "The C Programming Language" weighed in at about 220 pages. Sadly, the book then goes on for another 125 pages churning out what looks like repackaged JavaDoc for each of the major classes in the commons. You may like this, but it annoys the beans out of me and it'll reduce the score on one of my reviews faster than the Linux community can debunk a SCO IP infringement claim.

Summary

I really wanted to like this book. But it feels like someone was cranking the handle on a cash machine and thought that if they printed stuff about Jakarta, that the geeks would obediently buy it. Not this time. There are other books about the Jakarta Commons; buy one of those."

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